This large show covered conventional buses and trucks very well with many on display and being demonstrated in action, the story being one of incremental improvement with very limited interest in saving the planet - more a matter of responding to ever tighter regulation. Some vehicles had chimneys rather than exhaust pipes - the old is very much with us.
As with aircraft, there is a trend to more and more electrification, much of it underwhelming. That included several stands pronouncing the breakthrough of the electrical fan cooler and electric rear action for trash trucks and refrigerated vehicles. Some impressive large refrigeration units for trucks were shown and there was disturbingly accurate face recognition for buses etc. This author had his face captured as he walked up and his correct age displayed with no indication on happiness, surprise, sadness etc then the next photo correctly identified anger way off the scale!
The components area seemed largely confined to yesterday's parts such as sale of leather, someone else's LED lights dropped into a plastic case (at least 11 stands), pieces of bent metal, simple seating and so on. Siemens did not even exhibit. Hopefully eCarTec in Munich soon will display the future. Last year it had Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems KERS (flywheel energy harvesting on Formula One cars,large trucks and trialling on Volvo cars) and many state of the art traction batteries for example and visitors surely wish to see the complete gamut of new technologies now appearing in hybrid and pure electric vehicles and also in conventionally propelled lifters etc. Include in that supercapacitors, supercabatteries, silicon carbide power electronics, lithium metal batteries as opposed to lithium-ion, printed electronics and electrics, multiple energy harvesting (solar, thermoelectric, energy harvesting shock absorbers .......). This show revealed none of this.
It was interesting to observe the complete disagreement concerning how to design an urban or an intercity bus powertrain. In the city, Bombardier recommends its large pure electric bus and others had these too. In the case of Bombardier though, this bus uniquely charged in minutes using inductive charging: the driver does not need to get out. On the other hand, MAN had a hybrid with supercapacitor and no battery and others recommended their hybrids with lithium-ion batteries. Some were parallel hybrids and some series hybrids, in which case different range extenders were on offer. Sinautec had a pure electric bus with no battery and only supercapacitors charged in seconds at every bus stop. For inter-city bus transport the choice was narrower but not by much. They cannot all be right. The nearest we can give to a consensus statement is that most of the bus market by value for the next decade will be hybrids but even that has detractors in the industry. Certainly electric drive trains are least attractive for long distance trucks but, even here, there are paybacks.
Only a few seemed aware of the multiple energy harvesting capabilities near to market, that will prove useful, Accordingly, there are plenty of opportunities for the alert to pull ahead even before the fuel cell range extender becomes viable. We shall report on the conference in another article because this provided some more insight into what is going on technically and, for Germany, organisationally and, certainly, the Germans know how to organise themselves - truly formidable.
The IDTechEx events Energy Harvesting & Storage co-located with Wiresless Sensor Networks & RTLS and Supercapacitors USA, will cover all forms of energy harvesting, supercapacitors, supercabatteries and - another newly important part of the automotive scene - wireless sensors and actuators.
