We recently reported that a stunning 470 BYD electric buses were headed to Bogotá, Colombia. That was apparently the warmup act. BYD has now been selected to provide the city with 1,002 more electric buses. This comes from winning an open tender the city put out.
If it seems like you haven’t seen such a large electric bus order before, that’s because you haven’t. BYD reports that this is the largest order for purely electric buses that any company has gotten anywhere outside of China’s borders.
And that’s just the start of the fun with this good-news story. The city didn’t only put out a tender for battery-electric buses. It put out a tender in August for 1,295 buses, and they could be fueled by diesel, CNG, or electricity. The fact that BYD electric buses were selected for 1,002 of those is a great sign regarding the competitiveness of electric buses in a large city. (Not that we didn’t know electric buses were competitive. But sometimes it seems like Western transit agencies don’t.)
Bogotá City Public Transport Authority (TRANSMILENIO S.A.) put out the tender and will be buying the buses. And, technically, it was three different BYD partners that won bids totalling 1,002 buses.
“This batch of buses is scheduled to be delivered during 2021 and into the first half of 2022, and will be put into operation on 34 bus routes across five regions of the capital, providing residents along the routes with quiet, safe and emissions-free travel services,” BYD reports. Both 9-meter and 12-meter electric buses will be delivered, as happened in the case of the 470 buses delivered in December.
Bus body parts will be built within Colombia with local bus manufacturing partners Superpolo and BUSSCAR. “Assembling the bus body parts in Colombia will not only help boost the national economy by creating skilled jobs for the local community, but also improve the quality of transportation services, cut carbon emissions, and improve the environment,” said Maria Fernanda Ortiz, head of the TRANSMILENIO S.A.
Kudos to BYD for its leadership developing electric buses and selling them around the world, and kudos to TRANSMILENIO, Bogotá, and Colombia as a whole for being quite quick to adopt large numbers of electric buses (by Western standards).
For some more BYD electric bus fun, check out these stories:
- 246 Electric Buses Hit The Streets In The Netherlands
- Finland Logs Its Largest Electric Bus Order Ever — 106 Electric Buses
- Bogota Gets 470 New Electric Buses, Berlin Gets 90
- Chile Orders 150 Electric Buses From BYD!
- BYD Is Selected For California Purchasing Contract
- BYD Electric Buses: 13 Million Zero-Emissions Miles In USA
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