Small?! The majority of London buses are double-deckers, around 11 meters in length with capacities up to 87 passengers (combined seating + standing). Perhaps not the world's largest buses, but I certainly wouldn't call them small!
> "Do you have a source that they run the entire day with no charging?"
Here's an old press release from when they were first introduced: "The buses are equipped with BYD-designed and built Iron-Phosphate batteries, delivering 345 kWh of power ... The batteries can power the bus for over 24 hours and up to 190 miles of typical urban driving on the service routes with a single daily recharging requiring only four hours."
(The reality is that on many central London bus routes, there just isn't anywhere where they could stop for an extended period for recharging. But as more electric buses expand to suburban routes, maybe that will be less of an issue)
London can’t use multi-segment articulated buses (“bendy buses”) due to street size and layout constraints. Basically they’re too long to fit in many places they need to go. They did actually experiment with them on a few routes some years ago, but they were withdrawn after a year or two.
But that doesn’t make London buses small, because they’re double-deckers. Instead of increasing the length, they increase the height.
In any case, bus size is a red herring when it comes to electrification. A larger bus simply gives you more space to install larger batteries, provided you don’t exceed class/axle weight limits etc. Being longer and having more axles, an articulated bus should be even easier to electrify than a double decker!
London has been operating electric buses for almost 10 years now and has a fleet of nearly 800 units. If they weren’t performing to expectations, I’m sure we would have heard about it and they wouldn’t keep buying them!
Look, I've been to London and I've been to Sweden. Your busses are smaller.
Being double decker means nothing when almost nobody wants to bother to go up. But even then. They're still smaller.
> London has been operating electric buses for almost 10 years now and has a fleet of nearly 800 units. If they weren’t performing to expectations, I’m sure we would have heard about it and they wouldn’t keep buying them!
Yes, public administrations are known to run at maximum efficiency and never let any other considerations to decide what to buy.
Like here in sweden they're obviously corrupt when deciding what to buy for public transport.
Do you have a source that they run the entire day with no charging?