At the "Utility Vehicles and Buses" session of the eCarTec conference in Munich, Dr Ulrich Piotrowski of Daimler EvoBus revealed more about the high stakes game being played by many of the major automotive companies in introducing fuel cells as range extenders in on-road vehicles.
Usually a lithium-ion high power density battery manages the load variation including regenerative braking but some will use supercapacitors instead of batteries in order to get better performance and longer life. This will mimic what Riversimple does with its fuel cell car and MAN does with its hybrid bus today.
Although Daimler is unusual in introducing fuel cell cars soon, initially at a cost of about one million dollars each according to some observers, the main focus is buses and trucks. Tata Motors, number one in India and owner of Jaguar Land Rover is planning to launch fuel cell buses and trucks around 2015 as is Toyota and others. Indeed, Daimler seems to have a program in synch with this. Here we learnt a little more about the economics, parity with diesel hybrid cost per person kilometer being expected for buses around 2021. He was negative about the large, pure electric buses favoured by Bombardier and many of the Chinese bus manufacturers, alleging that the fast charging damages the batteries reducing their life, there are problems of heating and of cost of charging infrastructure.
