Cape Town’s Golden Arrow Bus Services & BYD Sign Historic Purchase Agreement For 120 Electric Buses! – CleanTechnica

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Just yesterday, I wrote about how it was good to see the progress in the electric bus sector in Kenya, and how this was very encouraging and points to a big opportunity to tackle public transport issues across the continent. Today we get more good news! Cape Town-based Golden Arrow Bus Services has just signed a purchase agreement with BYD for 120 B12 electric buses! This is the largest ever order for electric buses in South Africa.

After four years of intensive testing, Golden Arrow Bus Services says it has taken a major step towards achieving its fleet electrification and renewable energy aims by confirming its first bulk order of 120 BYD buses. Deliveries are scheduled to start late in 2024, with all the buses expected to be operational before December 2025. The buses ordered are BYD B12 buses with similar specifications to the bulk of the Golden Arrow fleet.

According to Golden Arrow Bus Services and Frontier Transport Holdings’ Chief Executive Officer, Francois Meyer, this order marks a turning point in the company’s future trajectory. “This bulk order confirms our commitment to renewable energy and will also provide us with the larger scale operational data to pave the way towards full fleet electrification,” he says. To get to this point in the electrification process, Company Engineer Gideon Neethling and his team have been hard at work to ensure that Golden Arrow is able to optimally implement large-scale fleet electrification. “We are intensively preparing our workforce and infrastructure to operate a system with complex requirements, and this will involve many exciting future partnerships,” he says.

Here is a summary of Golden Arrow’s renewable energy journey:

• 2017: The pilot installation of two solar plants of 25kWp each.
• 2020: Increased solar capacity of 2 000kWp, which resulted in carbon neutral electricity status for two Golden Arrow facilities.
• 2020: Golden Arrow partners with BYD and uYilo (co-funding) to test two 100% electric buses for a 12-month period.
• 2021: Two BYD electric buses are officially introduced into service – a first for South Africa

Golden Arrow Bus Service (GABS) has been operating for 160 years, and has a bus fleet size of 1,200 buses and a total of 2,500 employees. GABS currently transports 220,000 commuters per day on 1,300 operational bus routes. The company became the first commuter bus company in South Africa to pilot and field test the use of electric buses in 2021. We previously covered news of the introduction of this pilot program here on CleanTechnica.

On average, a bus travels 60,000 km per year. For this amount of travel per year, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for electric vehicles could be quite attractive. The GABS pilot study, in collaboration with GreenCape, gave a real life case study on this and more.

The case study zoned in on:

• Battery range
• Charging duration
• Energy efficiency
• Performance along local topography
• Maintenance impact
• Energy cost savings
• Passenger satisfaction

The pilot was carried out for 18 months using 2 BYD K9 electric buses and showed $34,000 in reduced costs per bus per year.

• 2022: Purchase of third BYD bus, B12 65-seater Golden Arrow specification bus
• 2023: Fourth test bus introduced and approximately 200,000 km of road testing completed.
• 2024: Golden Arrow orders 120 BYD electric buses for delivery from Q4 2024 to Q4 2025.

It’s great to see that after a very successful pilot phase, GABS is buying 120 electric buses, which is the first phase of a mass rollout that targets progressively replacing its entire diesel fleet with electric buses.

Images courtesy of BYD, Golden Arrow