After One Year of Field Test, BYD Claims Perfect Results for E6, While Others Disagree
May 24th, 2011 | Posted in BYD | Electric CarBYD’s all-electric sedan, the E6, started to provide taxi service in the city of Shenzhen on May 17, 2010. The E6 taxi fleet eventually grew to 50 vehicles. One year has passed. How did they do in the real-world trial?
Perfectly, according to BYD, which is based in Shenzhen. "In this one year, the E6s passed tough tests, going through a burning hot summer and an unusually cold winter. Both the drivers and passengers are extremely satisfied," said Li Ke, Vice President of BYD.
According to an article posted on the company’s official site, an E6 taxicab can drive 300km on one charge and run as fast as 140km/h. On a typical day, it covered 400km, and avoided 60.4kg of CO2 emissions. The savings on gas added up to 7,578 Yuan (1,166 US dollars) per month per car.
What’s more, while the total mileage of the EV fleet topped 3 million km, the batteries showed little sign of diminishing efficiency and the ranges remained stable, allaying the fear that frequent recharges, especially in the fast mode, would significantly weaken the batteries’ performance.
Yet, we hear a different story from Pengcheng Electric Taxi Company, which operates the fleet (55% of Pengcheng is owned by the Shenzhen Bus Company, 45% by BYD). Du Jun, its General Manager, told reporters earlier this month that the E6 taxi team has incurred a huge financial loss and he wished the qualities of the cars can be improved.
While saving on fuel, a new E6 has a high price tag of 300,000 Yuan, compared with that of around 100,000 Yuan on an ordinary taxicab; costs nearly twice to get services and parts; earns significantly less as the electric sedan has to stop for long hours each day for recharge and routinely reject customers who want to go far. As a result, Pengcheng lost 7 million Yuan in the one-year trial period from the EV fleet.
For the battery, Du Jun said that several cars had noticeably smaller power capacities. The real problem can only be more severe than it appeared in Shenzhen, a city in the subtropical zone and having few, if any, freezing days that are known to be hostile to EV battery efficiency.
