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The first cellphones in 1989, those big brick phones, were $3,500 to $3,700 and lasted about 20 minutes because of the nickel-cadmium (NiCd) battery technology. Ten years later, the next-best thing was lithium-ion and that transformed the industry. The first clamshell cellphone was launched with the lithium-ion battery and that phone was $1,900 in the marketplace. The piggyback battery one had to buy became the commodity.
BYD America Vice President Michael Austin was with Motorola at that time as a global energy commodity manager. He said they were buying the batteries from Japan at the time for about $100. “The battery became the most expensive component in these portable electronics,” he said. “It was really ridiculous.”
BYD was founded in 1995 as a battery manufacturer. After lithium-ion, BYD developed a Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) battery. It was invented about 10 years ago; it was part of a spin-off of the Lithium family. A unique quality, though, is that it’s disposable; it’s an environmentally friendly platform. Austin said, “You could drink the battery acid.” He added, “No other competitor of BYD today uses battery chemistry that is disposable.”
Most of the battery cells for automotive starter batteries even today come from overseas. Part of the reason, Austin explained, was because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration pushed off those harmful chemistries a long time ago because of environmental concerns.
The BYD battery was the first battery that could be brought to the United States and you could manufacture without environmental impact. BYD invented the chemistry and Motorola was attracted to the batteries in 1999. Motorola qualified a battery from BYD in 2000 because the chemistries did not infringe on the Japanese. After that, BYD went to other cellphone manufacturers.
Moving from Batteries to Vehicles
China’s government didn’t allow private property car ownership until 1995; no one was allowed to own cars except the government. The government owned cars and their government workers could drive cars. The first year they started promoting consumer cars to market was in 1995.
In 2003, BYD bought a bankrupt car company in China. BYD Chairman Kevin Wong had a vision to electrify. Because no one was allowed to own cars except the government, he hadn’t even learned how to drive until he was 30. However, his vision was that gasoline is controlled by a very finite few powerhouses and he wanted everything to become domestic.
At the time, China and the United States were both importing about 50 percent of the oil consumed. Every time there was a problem in the Middle East, oil prices went up. Austin said China had a huge problem of hemorrhaging its gross domestic product. He said Wong’s vision was that if he could electrify his platform and produce them through renewable energy, hydro-electric, solar power, natural gas generation, it’s all domestic. “Every local municipality that moves to electrified transportation actually adopts a fueling platform that’s not controlled by a bigger power,” Austin said.
Wong also realized the trouble China was going to run into with all these new consumers buying gasoline cars. A huge pollution problem.
“Every major city in China has a huge congestion problem,” explained Austin. “The cars slow down when they’re in traffic and then they spew forth emissions.” He added, “The haze over Beijing and the haze over Shanghai is all transportation emissions. It’s not dirty coal; it’s transportation stopped everywhere.”
Hong Kong realized that if they just electrified its buses and taxis, they would eliminate 67 percent of its emissions. A bus runs 18 hours a day and a taxi is a three-shift operation.
Built for Electric
Wong looked at these buses as a completely different system, redesigning the whole architecture from the ground up. “It’s got to be as simple as a battery driving the wheel,” Austin said.
Wong decided he was going to develop in-wheel hub motors: no transmission, no drive train, no loses because every point of contact is a friction loss. With in-wheel hub motors driving the buses, it would be the most efficient platform.
Austin stressed it was important he started from scratch on making an electric bus. “Don’t try to put a car transmission on; that doesn’t make any sense. A lot of our competitors are swapping the engine with an electric motor. That’s not efficient. You have all these transmission linkages, drivetrain connectors. You’ve got all that friction element that made the gasoline engine work but are not necessary in an electric bus.”
Austin explained that the in-wheel hub motors are just as powerful. “We’ve had buses climbing mountains in Utah that no diesel bus or natural gas bus has ever climbed before because you can have instantaneous torque in these electric motors. They’re powerful.”
And, that’s what Tesla’s been able to prove. Tesla’s car, without any regulation, can beat any Porsche off the line because it’s instant torque. You can burn the rubber right off the wheel with those because electric motors are far superior in torque than any internal combustion engine vehicle. Austin explained that Tesla is using the high-end toxic iron phosphate and that the battery BYD is using is about 15 percent less energy dense than Teslas. However, the buses have room for the battery so you can put it on board to make the bus last all day. “It’s cheaper and it’s environmentally friendly,” said Austin.
The other thing the in-wheel hub did, Austin explained, was that it allowed for the floor to be dropped, because there’s no axle below the passengers anymore. “You’re able to make a very elderly friendly, very loading-friendly, disabled-friendly bus with a super-low floor,” said Austin. “It was 9 inches and a flat-floor throughout the bus.”
Leveraging Experience
The other thing BYD got really good at doing early on was getting the Chinese leverage, Austin explained. “China has a monster economy and they are more mass transit friendly than anyone in the United States.
“We have 66,000 in our full bus rapid transit market. They have 1.5 million buses in their rapid transit market,” he stated.
“Let their volume drive all the learning and drive all the commodity pricing and drive those costs and let us take advantage of those technologies and drive a really competitive bus.”
Austin reiterated, “I’m an engineer; I’m a mechanical engineer. Our whole goal was reduce parts, reduce parts, reduce parts.” He continued, “Every part was an opportunity for error. Every part was an opportunity for failure. Every part was an opportunity for maintenance problems. Even reducing it by 50 percent, you take a 1,000-part bus down to 500 parts.”
He said BYD has 6,000 buses ordered and delivered by the end of this year. “There’s no electric bus manufacturer in the world, definitely not in the United States, that’s been able to deliver that many electric buses.
“That scale drives quality improvements, that drives maturity curves and that drives commodity curves.
“That makes somebody say, ‘I don’t want to buy from a bus company that’s sold 10 buses because oh my gosh, I’m No. 11. That’s in the pilot stage. If I’m buying from a company that’s done 6,000 of these buses, they’re either going to be broke and bankrupt because every one of those buses sucked or they’re going to be OK because that’s a lot of experience.”
In one fleet in the city of Shengzen, they run about 780 buses that have run 41.8 million miles in service. The electric taxis they operate use the same battery module, so buses and taxis combined, it’s more than 50 million miles in revenue service.
There’s more than 5 years of data that BYD is collecting and Austin said they are examining what happens to the battery after 5 years and what will happen to the battery after 10 years. “We know based on laboratory tests and our cycling that we have a 27-year battery in a vehicle application where it’s exposed to temperature fluctuations and it’s exposed to vibration.”
The taxis are run 450,000 miles in 5 years, running three shifts a day. When taking the taxis out of service, Austin said they’ll reclaim the battery because the battery’s not beat up like the interiors of the cars are. “We still have 91 percent capacity left in those batteries,” he explained. “In 450,000 miles, we’ve only consumed 9 percent. That’s like saying I’ve got a 100-gallon tank to begin with and now after 5 years with 450,000 miles, my tank has shrunk to 90 gallons. Is it still going to store fuel? Absolutely.
“We repurpose those as 90-gallon tanks so they’re smaller and into fixed-energy storage or renewable batteries for home-energy storage or for grid storage. All of these batteries can now be recertified into a different application and not a range-critical application.” He added, “It’s perfect because it’s already been fully appreciated for its first purpose; it’s beautiful.”
The 27-year battery will outlive the bus and it comes with a 12-year battery warranty. And, it’s low enough cost that they can put enough battery on the bus to run a 24-hour bus.
Moving to an Electric Platform
Austin said the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has allowed BYD to literally match the price of an electric bus with the price of a diesel bus. Initially he said it was unfair because you had to lump all the batteries together; like you were buying fuel for the next 20 years. “Now they’re letting us capitalize that lease expense for transit companies. It’s a fabulous business model.”
He said they’ve done analysis that show electric buses are competitive compared to diesel buses. If a bus drives 2,000 miles, consuming 4 miles per gallon, that’s 500 gallons. If gas is $3.00 a gallon, that’s $1,500 of fuel. If it’s $2.00 a gallon, that’s $1,000. That same bus can go that same distance on 324 KiloWatt hours of battery at a cost of $.11. That’s $36.00 of electricity. The payback is about 3 years on a 12- to 15-year bus, Austin said.
“You go and let transit managers and operations managers test the bus for a month and they’re saving nearly $1,000 a day per bus,” Austin said.
Austin described fossil fuel as a shackle. “It shackles you to one fuel for the next 15 years.
“If you jump on natural gas, you’re shackled to that one fuel for the next 15 years. If you move to an electrified platform, today you might be burning coal but I promise you in the next 5 years, that energy mix will change and you immediately adopt it.
“There are so many things that are going to happen in the next 20 years to our energy grid and I promise you, it’s not going to get dirtier, it’s only going to get cleaner,” said Austin. “That means these electrified transportation systems will only get cleaner. It will be the cleanest energy transportation out there because it is adaptable to any fuel source; they’re agnostic to the energy source.”
Even if the vehicles are being run on electric generations from coal, it’s outside the city center. “I don’t want pollution occurring anywhere, but where they do put the power plants is away from people so at least you don’t have the pollution occurring in the middle of the city where all the people are,” he said.
While natural gas is a domestic fuel, it’s 88 percent efficient running in a GE genset for electricity generation. “It’s only 15 to 20 percent efficient in a natural gas bus,” said Austin. “We waste more natural gas resources putting it into a vehicle and if you would just use that natural gas resource to generate electricity, there is nothing more efficient than carrying energy in electricity. Electrons are the most efficient carrier; they have the best conversion rate because you’re not losing anything in friction and you’re not exploding in an engine and you’re not losing it in heat.”
Most of the efficiency lost in a diesel bus and in a natural gas bus is all lost in heat; that’s the whole nature of it because of internal combustion. Austin said you’re about 5 percent efficient, only recovering 15 percent to the wheels while the remaining 85 percent is lost in heat.
With electrons, you’re going to lost 9 percent and be 91 percent efficient.
“Electrification to me is a no-brainer,” stated Austin.
“Their No. 1 goal is on-time service. They don’t want to upset on-time service and I would argue, moving to a platform that has half as many parts from the bus will move you to a more reliable platform.”
He explained further, “On an electric bus you’ve got a battery and you’ll have motors. Electric buses have so fewer parts, there are fewer opportunities for error to break down.
“They don’t have a clutching system, they don’t have a drivetrain, they don’t have a transmission system. That’s all downtime an electric bus never has to experience,” Austin said.
Planning for Electric
Austin said one could expect that a bus battery lose about 80 percent in a 5-years’ time. Another 5 years would leave it with 16 percent degradation. For the full 15 years of the bus life, it’s probably around 70 percent from the original state of charge.
When looking at the route for the electric bus, he said he would want to make sure he had more than 30 or 40 percent of the battery left when he pulled them into the station so that after 15 years, that route can still be done with a full charge.
“We help transit companies look at routes and say yeah, this route is absolutely good for service for 15 years and we’ll guarantee the battery for 12.” He added, “Of course if there’s any defective battery, we will find out in the first year but 12 years gives them a good comfort level. At 12 years, I can go back and if it’s not functioning to the mileage we thought it would, get a new battery.”
While he said he hasn’t found a city transit route that they can’t do, he has seen some really long charter routes that are 300 to 400 miles that you’re going to have to do some in-route charging during the day. “You can still do it, you just have to consider opportunity charging,” he explained.
He compared it to making a cellphone charge last a week. You charge it at work, you may plug it into your car, you opportunity charge it to make it last that week. “You met technology half way. You accept the fact that the Android phone has a battery that gets you through your day and if it doesn’t, you plug it in.
“Consumers have already bridged this gap that we’re trying to get transit companies to bridge.”
The only other consideration is when it comes to extreme cold weather because there’s not that 85 percent heat loss on the bus like on a diesel or natural gas engine. Normally that heat is taken and transferred back into the cabin. Anything south of New York or Minnesota can rely on electric heating but when you move up into Canada, they have had supplement heaters on board to help keep the interior warm. Austin said, “There’s minimal impact in the United States but it’s going to be a 20 to 30 percent range hit to electrify in the super frigid regions.”
The Economics of Electric
In the United States there are 3,400 different grids and 3,400 different energy companies, said Austin. While some energies are more progressive offering a lot of incentives to charge, some are not. As an example, he said even in California, if you’re charging at night, the brown rate is around $.11.
While charging during the day could cause concern for pricing, you could face utility charges, probably $.50 a Kilowatt, and then you don’t have the payback.
“If you’re doing in-route charging like some of our competitors do and you’ve got 500 kilowatts you’re going to charge in the middle of the day, you’re going to face utility charges. Then you’re struggling,” said Austin. “You’ve still got great environmental improvements, you still have the silent buses, but what you don’t get is the economic impact.”
The other concern he pointed out is what happens if the power grid goes out mid-day?
If you can have a battery that charges fully at night and it’s fully charged, you can do your entire service all day without having to charge; that is optimal, as the service is covered for the day.
“I think it’s going to revolutionize rapid transit,” Austin said of their vehicles. “It will revolutionize it first from an economic standpoint and immediately, as soon as you start seeing you can meet your capital costs, your operational costs, then you can expand service and that creates more jobs. On top of that, you’re using a fuel that’s domestically produced so you’re creating more domestic jobs.
“There’s a multiplier effect when you electrify transportation that you don’t get when you move to any kind of fossil fuel platform.
