Electric bus 'limited'
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EXPERIMENTS with one of the Department of Trade and Industry's two Crompton Leyland battery electric buses in Edinburgh have shown the vehicle to be too limited by range and capacity to be a serious competitor to conventional vehicles at present. This is the substance of a report by the Edinburgh transport department to the DTI, details of which have appeared recently in the Scottish press. While in Edinburgh the 19-seater bus, which has been under test by several operators for the past two years, operated a 4.5 km (2.8-mile) circular route in the city centre from midmorning till the beginning of the afternoon peak. Throughout the trial it maintained schedule and met passenger demand, says the report. The reliability was outstanding and almost half the necessary maintenance was attributable to the unsuitable braking system which would clearly be modified on a production vehicle.
Fuel costs for the trial — conducted before the dramatic rise in fuel prices — worked out at 0.63p per km (1.01p per mile) compared with 1.43p per km (2.31p per mile) for a comparative diesel bus.
The biggest problem with the vehicle, said the report, . was its limited range of about 80 km (50 miles) between battery recharges. "The limited range of the vehicle between recharging is felt to be the feature which most restricts its suitability for wider use. Although much experience of considerable value was obtained as a result of this experiment, it is not considered that a vehicle of this size and operating range would be suitable for use in Edinburgh," concludes the report.