No emission rather than low emission

Kuchta It’s quite clear that the future of urban mobility is electric. We find it absolutely electrifying and are therefore relying fully on battery-powered vehicles. We’re already offering the MAN Lion’s City E as the fully electric solution for public transport. The operators are benefiting from our overall concept, which combines holistic e-mobility consulting with customised, forward-thinking mobility solutions. This involves us keeping an overview of central issues like charging infrastructure, sustainability and digitisation.  

Kuchta The first fully electric articulated buses go into series production from April 2021. Practical tests play an important role here too. The articulated bus will, just like the solo bus, undergo customer testing at different locations under real conditions in day-to-day operations – in specific terms initially in Cologne and Barcelona. 

Kuchta They enable multiple insights into aspects like different topographical or climatic conditions. We incorporate this experience into development and production, and also share it with our customers. That’s the only way to incrementally improve our buses. 

Kuchta In addition to availability and reliability, it’s mainly the issue of range that’s a key criterion for our customers. The ultimate intention in the future is for only one electric vehicle to be travelling on routes that were previously served by a single combustion-engined vehicle. Otherwise it wouldn’t be economically viable for public transport to convert to electric mobility. 

Kuchta The Lion’s City E ensures a reliable range of 200 kilometres over the entire life of the batteries. This can even extend to 270 kilometres under favourable conditions. So transport companies can already use our electric bus to  passengers on a majority of their routes without intermediate charging. But we’re far from satisfied with that, of course. We want to use the next battery generation to substantially extend the range of our buses with fully electric drives. They should be capable of up to 400 kilometres by 2025. This would mean that our customers could cover around 90 percent of all their routes using sustainable electric mobility. 

Kuchta It has set the benchmarks for the urban mobility of the future: firstly, there are the legal requirements for CO2 reduction. And most recently, since the European Union adopted the “Clean Vehicle Directive”, urban areas have to set the course for emission-free mobility. The aim is to move from “low emission” to “no emission”. More and more public transport companies have grasped this and are relying solely on battery-powered urban buses for new purchases. Or they are defining clear time targets for converting their entire fleet to zero-emission drives. 

Kuchta We see this trend very clearly. The total European electric bus market included over 2,000 vehicles in 2020. And the trend is clearly rising. 

Kuchta We are continuously ramping up production to be able to successfully offer the Lion’s City E in this dynamically growing market. The current ramp-up means we’ll be able to produce around 400 e-buses in 2021. In the coming years, we’ll be able to produce up to 2,500 vehicles a year in our plant in Poland. We’re in a position to create additional production capacity by means of further investment if demand continue to rise after 2026.