Two premieres are ready to be launched in the short and medium term: the new A330 FC hydrogen bus and the innovative Van Hool Exqui.City 18 FC bus, which will be on the road from the end of 2019 in Pau, France. It will be the first BRT system in Europe running on hydrogen.
Van Hool, through the responsible of sales public services Geert Van Hecke, took part to the Zero Emission Bus Conference Europe 2018 in Cologne, that saw Sustainable Bus as media partner. Van Hool’s history is 70 years long, and fully focused on export: 90 per cent of the production (1,200 buses and coaches per year) is exported worldwide. The employers in the two production facilities (Belgium and Macedonia) are 4,900. At the moment, the manufacturing capacity of Van Hool is 3 fuel cell buses/week. From September 2019 it will rise up to 1 fuel cell bus/day. And there are plans for a plant in the US, where the new factory will be in operation from 2020. In the same year is scheduled the launch of the CX-E coach, of course hydrogen fuelled.
According to Van Hool, as Van Hecke said in Cologne, hydrogen has most potential to become «the disruptive technology driving large scale zero emission deployment». The answer relies on physics: the figures presented by Van Hool at European Zero Emission Bus Conference show that a fuel cell bus can carry 2.4 times more energy than a battery electric bus. And the time to charge would be 8.5 times faster.
The new A330 FC will be delivered in 30 units to Cologne (that is tendering 53 battery electric buses), and other 10 vehicles will be deployed in Wuppertal through Jive 2 EU funded program. The vehicle, when deployed on flat urban service lines, will be equipped with 24 kWh traction battery and 85 kW hydrogen fuel stack. The version of the bus for regional and hilly city services is fitted with a 36 kWh traction battery.
