Daimler Buses will be bringing both the all-electric Citaro E-CELL bus and the hydrogen fuel-cell Citaro F-CELL bus to production standard and “on the roads” by the year 2018, according to a recent press release.
The two “alternative fuel” models are part of the company’s E-Mobility platform, and share many of the same design elements — including charging system design, plug-in design, rooftop current collector system design, etc. The thought process behind the platform’s inception regards the creation of an urban bus design with interchangeable power train system technologies (electric, fuel-cell, etc).
The new Citaro F-CELL bus is based on the testing and validation work done with the current 3rd generation of the company’s fuel-cell buses. The upcoming 4th generation will use hydrogen at a rate of under 10 kg/100 km.
Here’s more from the press release:
As an alternative to the further optimized drivetrain with a combustion engine, the next steps on the road to the future are the battery-electric Citaro E-CELL and the hydrogen-driven Citaro F-CELL. They are based on a joint E-Mobility platform.
…In the development of these technologies, Daimler Buses benefits strongly from its affiliation in the group because the vehicle divisions are also working together on the road to emission-free driving. For example, this also applies for the integration of the new electronics platform B2E in the Citaro. It is even more powerful, more reliable and more flexible. In addition, in the course of its introduction, the working area for the driver was upgraded again, among other things, by a larger and more visible Color display and simplified operating elements for the heating, ventilation and air conditioning.
With the electric bus sector as amorphous as it currently is, it’ll be interesting to see how Daimler does over the coming years.