Future Car Technology Being Applied to Buses, Trucks First

According to industry sources, the electric bus sales volume in the Chinese market totaled 117,000 units in 2015 to show a four-fold increase from a year earlier and is estimated to have topped 200,000 in 2016.

These days, Chinese automakers are supplying an increasing number of advanced yet inexpensive commercial electric vehicles in the global market. For example, BYD recently signed contracts to supply 85 electric buses in California and 150 in Indonesia and KMB is working with Gwangju City and Korea Express to develop small electric trucks for door-to-door parcel delivery.

In the meantime, the Future Bus of Mercedes Benz equipped with the City Pilot system for self-driving succeeded in covering a 20 km-route in August last year. Mitsubishi Fuso Truck and Bus Corporation is planning to launch the eCanter, a seven-ton electric truck, soon. Volkswagen’s four-ton electric van is likely to make its debut this year while Tesla unveils its electric truck concept. Volvo has tested its fully self-driving truck since August last year in an underground min tunnel in Sweden. At the European Truck Platooning Challenge in April last year, six European automakers such as Mercedes Benz, Scania and Volvo successfully tested their trucks over a distance of 600 km to 2,000 km while maintaining an inter-vehicle distance of 10 to 15 meters. Japanese companies like Hino and Isuzu are planning to conduct a similar test in early 2019.

Global automakers are applying their future car technology to commercial vehicles first as mentioned above because various governments are tightening environmental regulations with regard to that type of vehicles. An average commercial vehicle’s nitrogen oxide emissions amount to 47.6 times the emissions of an average non-commercial vehicle and the former’s daily traveling distance is more than four times that of the latter, which means electric technology combined with the former can result in a significant contribution to fuel cost reduction. In addition, self-driving commercial vehicles can be attained with a lower level of self-driving technology in comparison to cars in general because they are operated along predetermined routes in many cases.