JBM Solaris Eco-life 12m: Test Driving An Electric Bus To Ascertain The Future Of Bus Driving!

Driving an electric bus is not just fascinating, but offers a different kind of CV motoring experience that will shape the future. The more you get to know this bus, the more complex and interesting it becomes. Senior Correspondent and Test Driver Dhiyanesh Ravichandran finds out the nuts and bolts of electric bus driving after spending a day with ECO-LIFE low-floor on the test track.

- Dhiyanesh Ravichandran

A lot has happened since the 20th century in the lives of humans, proffering practical and tangible enhancements to the way they were living for ages, while also adding unwarranted complexities, fairly speaking. And if you were to find a common connecting factor behind all such transformations that human civilisation has gone through, and continues to, like never before, what could be more pertinent than the discovery of electricity and tons of inventions that applied the phenomenon into domestic and industrial uses? Indeed, not up until brilliant minds like Benjamin Franklin conducted extensive research, including his famous thunderstorm experiment in 1752, and a series of others who followed him in the next century, electricity turned from a mere intellectual curiosity into an essential tool of modern life in the centuries that followed.

But ironically, the discernment that advances in electrical science could transform the motoring and mobility needs of people sustainably did not catch up around the time when it was already overtaking steam engines in automobiles. A century later, here we are again, realising that electricity is the panacea to a fossil-fuel-free, extraordinary future of motoring! From what we have seen and heard thus far in the last two decades or so, electric propulsion systems are steadily replacing internal combustion engines in automobiles.

It’s just a matter of time before all private passenger vehicles and buses plying on our roads are electrified – trucks may join the club a little later. One way or the other, it’s imminent and bound to happen someday. But the critical question among most of the automotive professionals is on enhancements and value-additions that e-mobility can contribute to motoring, on the premise that a lot of advances could have happened in this undue transition. Is e-mobility a progressive revolution or just an ineluctable mediocrity being imposed upon us for a noble cause?