New, low-floor BYD electric solo buses are set to hit the streets from Monday, the Budapest Transport Centre (BKK) announced on Friday to MTI.
New electric buses to serve passengers from Monday
According to their statement, the first five of these comfortable, modern vehicles equipped with advanced assistive systems will operate on routes 105 and 210. Commissioned by BKK and owned and operated by ArrivaBus Ltd., a total of 82 brand-new fully electric buses — 58 solo and 24 articulated — will modernise the capital’s fleet by 2027, they wrote.
The BKK and its service partner ArrivaBus Ltd. signed a contract which initially planned for the buses to start service in spring 2026. However, following preparatory work (including regulatory inspections, fitting the vehicles with specific systems, and installing charging infrastructure), trial runs began in November, so the buses will enter service much earlier than scheduled.
New buses match the daily mileage of diesel vehicles
The statement quotes Anikó Körmendi, CEO of Arriva Hungary Plc, saying their goal is to have 82 brand-new BYD electric buses serving Budapest’s daily transport needs by the first quarter of 2026, including the country’s very first electric articulated buses.
Ádám Bodor, BKK’s Deputy CEO for Mobility Development, highlighted that the new electric buses can match the daily mileage of diesel vehicles on a single charge. Thanks to their design, the new buses offer ample priority space for wheelchair users and people with prams, and they also accommodate bicycles, the announcement added.
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1. Where does the power needed to recharge these buses come from, and how “sustainable” (rolls eyes) is it?
2. Can the electric grid handle the power consumption of these vehicles?
3. What is the lifespan of the batteries powering these buses?
4. Are the batteries recyclable?
5. Were the components for the batteries ethically sourced, i.e. being free from African child slave labor?
6. What is the TOTAL “carbon footprint” (rolls eyes) of these buses compared to their fossil fuel counterparts, i.e. taking the entire arc including their fabrication through to their decommissioning?
7. What is the weight of these buses compared to the fossil fuel-powered ones and, if they are considerably heavier, how does that affect their “sustainability” and environmental impact?
There: some critical thinking questions for the “green” imbeciles.
While your questions are considered and legitimate, the fact that you’re asking them implies you’re not up to date and hostile to battery electric as a means of propulsion for road transport.
1. Quite obviously power comes from the grid, although they can be recharged direct from solar farms where available. Hungary has a high percentage of electricity generated from nuclear sources and this will increase when Paks II is completed. Hungarian electricity is relatively clean, although not in the same league as Austria or Norway who are largely self sufficient in hydroelectric power.
2. Yes it can, in particular as recharging tends to take place during the night when the grid is awash with surplus power, so much so that grids often need to take sources offline to avoid causing problems.
3. Battery lifespans have exceeded all expectations. Early electric cars were predicted to have 3-5 battery lives by the doubters; despite being experimental technology at the time, my EV is still going strong on its original battery at 11 years old.
4. Batteries have very high recycling potential due to the possibility to harvest the real earth minerals therein; even before they’re recycled they can have a long second life in battery farms (once they retain insufficient capacity for use in the road vehicles they were originally installed in) that harvest surplus power from renewable sources, or just merely recharged with cheap overnight electricity, serving as a buffer for the grid and lowering an operator’s electricity bill.
5. This is a matter for the battery manufacturer, not the vehicle manufacturer, but there is increasing awareness of the need to ethically source the minerals that go into batteries, quite apart from which the current tech uses less of them and many do without some of the rarest/most expensive minerals entirely, e.g. lithium. The underlying tech is advancing at a dizzying pace with increasing energy density and more efficient designs that make them cheaper to make and less environmentally harmful.
6. The crossover point is, very broadly, around 100k km, which is around 10% into the expected service life of a bus or goods vehicle. At this juncture I should also point out the enormous benefit of not polluting city air with diesel fumes. One diesel bus will generate the pollution of approximately 20 modern cars, aggravated by the regular stop-start nature of urban bus routes leading to high levels of pollution at bus stops, precisely where people congregate by the roadside. Diesel fumes contain high levels of particulates that once inhaled, are never expelled by the body.
7. Battery electric vehicles tend to be heavier which has an impact on their efficiency and the degree of wear to the road surface, but this needs to be juxtaposed with their lack of tailpipe emissions. The weight penalty is decreasing all the time as energy density increases, therefore requiring a lighter battery pack to store the same amount of energy.
There is nothing imbecilic about any of this, a great many very intelligent people are involved with the design and manufacture of these vehicles and more intelligent people are on the teams that carefully select models as replacements in the fleet. At the end of the day, the transition is being driven by money, not primarily an environmental motivation. Battery electric is simpler, cheaper to fuel and cheaper to maintain with less to go wrong, which is particularly beneficial in the latter 50% of the vehicle’s service life when factory-fitted components start to wear out causing breakdowns, requiring expensive repairs and time off the road.