May Mobility reveals electric autonomous minibus at CES 2025
techcrunch.com

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23 points

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rustoo

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3 months ago

14 comments

sp0ck ・ 3 months ago

I'm always sceptic about range. Polish city Gdańsk made tender for electric buses. Requrement was at least 400km real range. Winner promise that and reality was ~250km. There was no chargers installed on terminal loops because it should handle whole day on single charge. That is result of designing system without actual tests and rely only on vendor promises :)

  • Traubenfuchs ・ 3 months ago

    Tell me they had to pay significant contractual fines that were at least enough to install all the required chargers.

  • Moldoteck ・ 3 months ago

    imo in many cases trolleys with some additional bess is sufficient unless you really want long ranges without trolley infra

ajdlinux ・ 3 months ago

This company isn't the only one running autonomous shuttle buses - what makes theirs different from their competitors?

  • bobthepanda ・ 3 months ago

    I suppose it's bigger? It says it has a capacity of 30.

    The thing that interests me, is does this thing go faster than 30kph? Because so far all the minibus pilots have basically been for parking lot shuttles.

    • gloflo ・ 3 months ago

      30kph is more than enough for any urban setting.

      • bobthepanda ・ 3 months ago
        ・ 4 more

        maybe on tiny residential side roads.

        even in Amsterdam, where most speed limits have reduced to 30kph, there are still main roads and public transport lanes signed for 50kph. https://etsc.eu/amsterdam-follows-paris-brussels-and-madrid-...

        and bus operators put a lot of effort into fleet economies of scale, so having to hive their fleets in two with slower and faster buses is unlikely to go well. Especially since there are perfectly valid reasons for an out-of-service bus to use a faster road; 30kph as a maximum is slow enough that the vehicle would be banned from certain classes of road altogether.

        • TrueGeek ・ 3 months ago
          ・ 3 more

          > having to hive their fleets in two with slower and faster buses is unlikely to go well

          They already do this though. I don't know about Amsterdam, but in Limburg the buses are electric for in-city routes and gas for the longer routes between cities and countries.

          • user_7832 ・ 3 months ago

            I believe the Rotterdam buses (RET) that run till Delft/The Hague, effectively intercity, are all electric.

          • bobthepanda ・ 3 months ago

            N splits may be fine, but N+1 may not be, especially when you consider how rare 30kph only routes are.

      • constantcrying ・ 3 months ago

        30kph is a nuisance in any urban setting. Legitimately dangerous, when everyone else is going 50, which is the standard urban speed.

      • Moldoteck ・ 3 months ago

        for cars - mostly yes, for public transport - debatable, depending on area

constantcrying ・ 3 months ago

There are so many competitors though? Even VW is building a competing service, with trials starting soon.