Lord of the memes

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Someone has to keep this operation grounded in reality (lemmy.world)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Ah, yes the industry veterans. They had none. Most of the staff were recent university graduates. Those who weren't included a former minister, an engineer who designed various industrial buildings, like crude oil storage tanks, and electricity engineer.

Together, they designed and built a pantograph mostly by themselves, a high power charging system that worked through the roof that charged a 50 kW battery in 6 minutes.

The rest of the specialists were mostly obscure scientists, analysts, accountants and PR people.

Since I have already leaked myself, here is a picture of the "amazing superbus" prototype: link

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Well, at least it looks nice from a distance...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

The high-capacity pantograph charger/gantry is inspired. Since it's so far overhead it would appear to have some durability and safety advantages. I'm guessing that 6 minutes for 50kW is enough for charging in the field at the start/end of a route. Heck, now I'm wondering if you could get a substantial charge in the time it takes to onboard passengers at a stop.

Edit: exercising my position as an armchair engineer, this idea could still work but I think a business focus as making kits for adapting existing EVs to the gantry system, along with manufacturing the gantries themselves, would be way more viable than building entire busses from scratch.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The moving parts of the machine that come down to charge the bus were made by some Italian company, I think. And some of the electric parts that raise the power to the right amount were built by a Romanian company.

We did have capacitors arc and blow up once. Also, the charger itself arced and burned a hole in the metal where the bus parts and pantograph parts made the #-shaped contact.

Before designing electronics, the electrician in charge of the project tried to get a readymade system from ABB. They called him 9 months later to talk about it and he replied "Don't need it anymore. We built our own." And they were like "What do you mean, you built your own?!" 😄

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

They called him 9 months later [...] “What do you mean, you built your own?!”

LOL. With that kind of lead time, they were more or less asking for it.