Electric bus adoption in public transport urban fleet is growing all over the world. It started in China, and it has taken a few years for other regions to start the transition.
But now Europe is booming: the year 2019 will be remembered as the year when the electric bus sales volumes definitive ramp up. While in 2018 the European electric bus market increased of 48 per cent compared to 2017, the year 2019 saw a tripling in the number of electric bus registration in Western Europe.
A growing number of electric buses running worldwide
As of today, in Europe there are around 4,000 electric buses running (in the definition are included not only battery electric buses but also plugin hybrids, trolleybus IMC and fuel cell buses). A small part of the global circulating of 400,000 units of electric bus.
Still today, roughly 98 per cent of the electric buses in the world are deployed in Chinese cities, as already mentioned.
At the end of 2019, in Europe, the share of electric buses on the sales volumes of city buses should overcome the 10 per cent. According to UITP, it is going to rise up to 20 per cent in 2020.
Also India (70,000 buses sold in 2017) is a market with big potential, when even a small part of the orders will be electric.
And United States Market penetration was at about 0.5% of the total U.S. public transit bus market at the end of 2017, but in the same time 9% of all transit agencies either had electric buses in service or on order. Things are moving fast!
China leads the way
When it comes to electric buses, Chinese figures are striking. The ‘Electric Buses in Cities’ report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, published in spring 2018, tells about this wide-ranging revolution. In 2016 China was able to register 340 electric city buses every single day. In the same year 2016, Europe put about 70 buses on the road each day, regardless of the category (urban, intercity, coaches) and the kind of fuel. In this epochal change toward electric buses adoption, Europe and United States still have the role of background actors.