this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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Imagine you are trying to create something new, but not completely. Suppliers for most electric bus parts exist, ZTF being chief amongst them. Did the executives enter the market with a strategy to buy everything they could, assemble it, enter the market quicker, build many units, learn how busses are built and then innovate from experienced position? Nope.
A toddler learns to crawl before learning to run. A bird learns to hop before learning to fly. Our executives started to innovate before learning to build.
Why buy or build a metal frame? Too many parts, let's build the frame out of composite materials, only a few parts to glue together and the CEO has contacts amongst the yacht builders.
The end result drove like a tank. It had zero flexibility, was way too rigid for any passenger carrying vehicle and tended to lean to one side. Together with a bunch of windows that can't be opened and a skylight it was a greenhouse on wheels during the summer.
Composite parts getting glued required sanding and pieces of it are still embedded into poor sod's who did that hands.
The bus also featured a front windscreen curved too heavily for most crucibles to make one.
Can't we just buy a dashboard? No, can't get attached to a supplier, gotta build our own thing. The designer didn't plan for a spot for a driver to store their coat and bag. Also, it had no place to keep money and bus tickets for those passengers who didn't buy them earlier.
Several dashboards got designed, money dried up and the people who designed and built them left. Yup, all Fantastic Four of them, leaving a poorly documented mess for people who come after them.
I was tasked with building a telemetry system and a user information system.
Built a telemetry system with Grafana and a data collection script running in bus'es computer. Me and one other guy was the whole team.
For information system, I used Vue and Python on a Raspberry pi running cog, a very minimal WebKit browser. It had a 3D bus on an angled map and said which stops come next.
Amazing.
I'm not a business guy and I know nothing about commercial vehicles. But I have to imagine this setup is the hardest possible way to get into that market. I can appreciate wanting to build some kind of super-bus from the ground up, but unless your dream team is made up of industry veterans, that's not likely to work.
IMO, it would be better to start with ready-made vehicles and focus on attacking the underbelly of the establishment. Like bus routes that are expensive to service via conventional means, or communities that can't afford existing options. Or at least work with established players and solve their problems like logistics, labor, or cost optimization. Then you iterate and innovate from there, culminating at a "bus of your dreams" or whatever it was on the CEO's bucket list.
Looking at an industry that is over 100 years old and saying "we can do this better" from almost nothing is kind of insane.
Your telemetry and route visualization system sounds nice though - that kind of thing is in my wheelhouse.
Ah, yes the industry veterans. They had none. Most of the staff were recent university graduates. Those who weren't included a former minister, an engineer who designed various industrial buildings, like crude oil storage tanks, and electricity engineer.
Together, they designed and built a pantograph mostly by themselves, a high power charging system that worked through the roof that charged a 50 kW battery in 6 minutes.
The rest of the specialists were mostly obscure scientists, analysts, accountants and PR people.
Since I have already leaked myself, here is a picture of the "amazing superbus" prototype: link
The high-capacity pantograph charger/gantry is inspired. Since it's so far overhead it would appear to have some durability and safety advantages. I'm guessing that 6 minutes for 50kW is enough for charging in the field at the start/end of a route. Heck, now I'm wondering if you could get a substantial charge in the time it takes to onboard passengers at a stop.
Edit: exercising my position as an armchair engineer, this idea could still work but I think a business focus as making kits for adapting existing EVs to the gantry system, along with manufacturing the gantries themselves, would be way more viable than building entire busses from scratch.
The moving parts of the machine that come down to charge the bus were made by some Italian company, I think. And some of the electric parts that raise the power to the right amount were built by a Romanian company.
We did have capacitors arc and blow up once. Also, the charger itself arced and burned a hole in the metal where the bus parts and pantograph parts made the #-shaped contact.
Before designing electronics, the electrician in charge of the project tried to get a readymade system from ABB. They called him 9 months later to talk about it and he replied "Don't need it anymore. We built our own." And they were like "What do you mean, you built your own?!" 😄
LOL. With that kind of lead time, they were more or less asking for it.
Well, at least it looks nice from a distance...