Electric vehicles are on a charge. Not a day goes by without a mention in the press on how electric vehicles will one day consign fossil fuel driven cars to the history books. It seems it is not a question of if but when we will all be using EVs to get around. One key issue surrounding how quickly we all go electric is how far we can travel on a single charge so that there is no need to stop to power up when the battery runs low or worse still get stuck in the middle of no where without a charging point in sight. Those concerns may be about to blow a fuse after an electric bus travelled 1,102.2 miles on a single charge, smashing the previous record of 1,013.76 miles which was set by a vehicle that was 46 times lighter than the bus. Needless to say the designer of the bus, Californian company, Proterra is electrostatic about the result. Chief Executive Ryan Popple declared, “the future is all-electric, and the Sun is setting on combustion engine technology”. The secret behind the Catalyst E2 Max’s staying power is its battery, which has 660kWh of energy storage capacity, nearly nine times that of a Tesla Model S. And the bus is not a prototype that is years away from hitting the road. Already Proterra has sold over 400 buses to councils, universities and transport agencies in 20 states across the US. A Catalyst E2 Max could one day be coming to a bus stop near you.
