Originally published on CleanTechnica.
Carbridge, the onsite provider of airport ground transportation services for the Sydney Airport, announced that it has placed orders for 40 more pure electric buses from BYD. The contract was finalized at the end of January — just 3 months after the first BYD Electric Blu bus was first put to use at the Sydney Airport.
Carbridge’s full fleet is just 200 vehicles, meaning that just a few months into using BYD’s Electric Blu buses, Carbridge was ready to dive head first into an order to upgrade 20% of its fleet to electric buses. Though, the Sydney Airport also ran a trial of BYD electric buses back in 2014.
Overall, this speaks to just how much of a step up electric buses are for fleet operators when they are put to use in commercial service.
Speaking about the new contracts, BYD General Manager of BYD’s Asia Pacific Auto Sales Division, Liu Xueliang said:
“We are the first Chinese company to crack Australia’s electric bus market, having come a long way since the trial of our electric buses at the country’s busiest airport in Sydney in late 2014.”
The BYD Electric Blu bus can haul around a max of 70 passengers and features purpose-built luggage storage racks (as you would expect on a bus at the airport). It has a range of 249 miles (400 kilometers) on a single charge, which is just a bit lower range than the Tesla Model S with an 85 kWh pack.
The fleet of six electric buses currently being used in production at the Sydney Airport cuts an estimated 160 tons of carbon emission per year while also generating less noise pollution.
Scaling that up, the new fleet of 46 BYD buses stands to make a serious dent in the emissions generated by the bus fleet at the airport … though, serious work is still needed to mitigate the real source of emissions from the airport — the planes.
The Carbridge fleet also includes the BYD e6 electric SUV, which I had a chance to drive around a few months back. An old BYD press release shows that the e6 was piloted in parallel to the BYD buses at the Sydney Airport back in late 2014 / early 2015.
Reprinted with permission.