What Will The Future Of Electric Coach Hires Look Like?
Every year brings with it a sea change in coach hire, from a greater focus on luxury amenities to an improved ride, better seats and improved onboard entertainment. The demands of riders change and luxury coaches are there to exceed those demands.
However, one of the biggest changes on the horizon, and one that the coach industry is right in the centre of, is the adoption of electric buses to take passengers in an unparalleled level of comfort and quiet wherever they need to go.
The advantages of not having a gearbox to switch between, quieter motors without an engine, and increasingly cheap charging options and high-capacity batteries mean that it is a matter of when rather than if coaches will go green and go electric.
However, unlike cars, there are actually a lot of shapes electric buses can take, and to explain just how broad the options are, we need to have a look at the past, present and future of electric bus and coach design.
The Past
Electric coaches have an exceptionally long history in Great Britain. The London Electrobus Company had a popular fleet of electric buses from as early as 1906, but ultimately turned out to be an elaborate investment fraud.
However, a few years later, Leeds and Bradford came up with a solution that allowed for the cleanliness and convenience of electric buses but without all of the range issues that affected battery buses of the era.
The trolleybus was part bus, part tram, using a series of overhead electric wires that a bus would hook onto using spring-loaded poles much like an overhead rail.
They were exceptionally popular for the better part of half a century, particularly for trunk routes where there was enough value in fitting the electric power lines. Bradford ran its trolleybuses from 1911 until 1972, being the very first and very last city in Britain to run trolleybuses.
It might be an option for electric buses today, but the inherent restrictions in route selection make it less likely for use with long-distance coaches unless a lane of every motorway is electrified.
Paired with high-capacity batteries, however, and it could remain a potential option for future electric coaches even today.
Whether it will happen at the same scale it did throughout the early part of the 20th century, however, is anyone’s guess.
The Present
At present, the vast majority of electric buses are battery electric vehicles, of much the same variety seen on the road.
Several major coach providers have already made the switch to fully-electric double-decker electric coaches as well, primarily using models made by manufacturers such as Yutong, BYD, Wrightbus and several other major manufacturers.
The positives and negatives of using battery electric coaches are the same as the ones for electric vehicles, although the increased size and weight of coaches provide some potential workarounds.
Capacity remains an issue, although the longest of long-range batteries for electric cars has reached close to 500 miles, and the even longer wheelbase of a coach allows for an even greater range than this.
With that said, the effective range is still highly variable, and there will be a reliance on fast chargers close enough to any destination points to make a journey viable.
However, with battery technology improving exponentially and technologies such as sodium-ion and solid-state batteries making higher capacity technology more affordable, there is very much a chance that these barriers could be fixed much sooner than anyone could possibly expect.
The Future?
A lot of the great unknowns with electric coaches come with potential future technologies, ones that would make the current battery capacity issues largely obsolete.
One potential solution is solar panels, and whilst it has been tried in the past on much smaller scales, the rise of much more efficient photovoltaic cells makes it a far more promising prospect than it ever was before.
Alternatively, there have been examinations of so-called “electric roads” that allow for dynamic charging for coaches whilst driving on major roads, keeping them charged and avoiding range anxiety issues.
Finally, there is the potential to use capacitors in combination with batteries, which in combination with solar, regenerative braking and carefully placed charging locations means that local coaches could potentially not require giant battery banks to function.
The ultimate conclusion is that the future looks promising for electric coaches, but the exact shape of that future has not been etched in stone as of yet, with a lot of scope to transform the industry further in future.