Bus manufacturer, Wrightbus, has opened its NewPower facility in Bicester where it will be decarbonising fleets of buses by replacing diesel engines with electric powertrains. The Manufacturer’s Molly Cooper went to find out more.
Visiting the new Wrightbus NewPower facility on Clean Air Day seemed fitting. The European bus manufacturer has begun work on decarbonising Britain’s existing bus fleets in its new 45,000 sq. ft. facility dedicated to repowering. “This is not a fast promise, it works, and you can see that,” said Jean-Marc Gales, CEO of Wrightbus, as he showed me around.
The UK currently has 34,000 diesel buses on its roads but has insufficient funding to hit the zero emission targets the previous government has set for 2035. Inside the NewPower facility, the skilled technicians and engineers are replacing engines within diesel buses with a new battery powered alternative, costing half the price of a brand-new battery powered bus.
It removes the diesel engines and puts in an electrical powertrain in its place. “We can give our customers a ten year warranty on the engines and an extra ten years of life to that bus, all while removing 40,000 litres of diesel per year, (74 tonnes of CO2), from the road,” said Jean-Marc.
Expanding operations
Wrightbus is a UK and Northern Ireland bus manufacturer and operator with the widest range of net zero buses on the market. In addition to the repowering offering, the company is also forecast to manufacture 1,000 buses by the end of 2024 with orders from Arriva, First-Bus and Go-Ahead, all while breaking into the European market.
Currently the company is producing single decker hydrogen engine buses and left-hand drive vehicles for Germany. “We have set the new standard for efficiency,” said Jean-Marc. Currently, Wrightbus is the fastest growing large manufacturer in the UK, with 1,880 employees globally and large growth expected over the next year. It is also UK and Ireland’s leading zero emission OEM.
Wrightbus NewPower Facility in Bicester
With a manufacturing headquarters in Northern Ireland, a refurbishment workshop in Bicester – serving 22 buses a week with a 24/7 paint shop – a plant under development in Malaysia and the new repowering facility, the Wrightbus team are very busy.
Repower, NewPower
The repowering process is simple and can be done in only three weeks, in comparison to the nine-to-12-month window it takes to purchase a brand-new electric bus. The facility shopfloor is made up of six static product builds, unlike the standard process where the product goes along a production line.
Once the bus is in the workshop, the team get to work to do a full strip out, removing all the existing diesel engine parts. Repowering a bus will lead to a six per cent cost reduction over the lifetime of the bus.. Bus operators will also see a 41% reduction in incidents and repairs from the engine.
“It’s clear to see when you look at all the different parts we remove when stripping the diesel engine, and the fewer number of new components we use in a battery engine,” said Robert Best, Director of Engineering at Wrightbus. However, it’s important to note that the parts that are removed do not go to waste.
These are returned to the original bus operator which can use the parts as spares or repairs for its existing diesel fleets, making it a green process from the start. After this, any issues are fixed before moving on to prepare the space for the new engine. Once the engine is in, the bus will be commissioned and connected hydraulically, pneumatically and electrically.
The team on-site is able to mechanically certify and check to make sure that the new engine is present, correct and appropriate for use. Following this process, the vehicle will be moved for quality audit inspection, which represents the final check. Wrightbus then knows the bus is roadworthy and can be securely delivered back to the customer.
The process is seamless; nothing is touched on the suspension side of the bus and the new engine is fitted in the exact place of the previous one. Not only this, but Wrightbus does not touch the displays at the front of the bus. The driver’s dashboard stays the same, and a small screen is fitted to feature the new visualisations of the battery engine.
This also makes the transition for the bus driver much easier, as nothing has changed from their point of view. Right location for the right skills Bicester is the ideal location for the NewPower hub; close to London and in the heartland of the UK’s automotive sector.
“We are in a prime location. We have buses coming from London operators, Bristol and Oxford, as well as being next door neighbours to Formula One teams and other engineering companies,” said Jean-Marc.
This proximity to the capital and other engineering companies has proved advantageous for business, but also for people. Due to the saturation of engineering companies in the surrounding areas, it’s an ideal place to find new employees. The NewPower facility has already started production with 22 skilled engineers and is hoping to continue to grow this to 60 employees by the end of the year, sticking to the company ethos of building local communities.
“If we look around, we have seen Williams Racing grow from 400 to 700 employees and we also have the advantage of being close to Oxford University when we need to hire engineers to develop products in the future,” said Jean-Marc. Despite this, and like many manufacturing verticals in the UK, the sector does suffer from a skills shortage. “Together as a country, we need to be doing more in terms of apprenticeships and to make engineering a more attractive career path for young people.”
We need to continue to break down the stereotypes of engineering being unclean work, in dark and dingy factories. For me, when standing in the shiny new Wrightbus facility, it is hard to see why young engineers wouldn’t see this as an ideal place to work, they just need to know that it exists.
Currently, in the UK the share of manufacturing GDP is around 12%, whereas in the 1970s, it was contributing 25%. “We need to show that we can get back there with a new generation of skilled workers – manufacturing is the future,” said Jean-Marc.
Affordable decarbonisation
The easiest way to decarbonise mobility is by public transport. Encouraging people to buy electric vehicles is difficult, but electrifying a person’s public transport that they use every day, comes with no resistance.
“Local councils taking this decision is the quickest and most cost-efficient way of doing it – if it is a priority to get zero-emission buses on the roads,” explains Jean-Marc. For many people, especially in cities such as London, buses are their main means of transport meaning government and authorities are responsible for decarbonising their means of travel.
The new repowering model from Wrightbus is a huge step in the right direction for the UK in terms of decarbonisation. Currently, Wrightbus is the largest buyer of batteries in the truck and bus sector in the UK. And, due to the large amount being purchased by Wrightbus, the company can make it affordable to its customers.
“We have manufactured 100 battery powered buses this year, and we are looking to repower 300 buses by 2025, and then 500 by 2026,” said Jean-Marc. This scaling of the business allows Wrightbus to make its products affordable to its customers. “We can reduce costs of materials that we are using and that gives us the possibility to grow our business, to hit those targets to get diesel buses off the road.”
To keep up with demand, Wrightbus will be recruiting more technicians and highly skilled engineers to work on the buses. “We have a letter of intent from a bus operator to decarbonise its whole fleet; that will keep us busy at the facility until the middle of next year,” said Jean-Marc. With the growing workload, Jean-Marc has no hesitation that Wrightbus will be able to handle it.
“We are in the process of hiring, and in the future, we may need to extend our working hours, or even look at night shifts. Currently the facility here is only open five days a week, but we could go to seven. In order to further help with the increased workload we are also planning to open another facility.”
The right experience
A unique selling point for Wrightbus is its knowledge and experience in hydrogen batteries as it is part of the HydraB Power family. “We have a very in-depth team based inside our facility and our own bespoke research facility in Queens University Belfast, which is the world’s only research facility dedicated entirely to bus technology,” explained Robert.
Wrightbus has the same knowledge and experience from its engineers who have worked on the hydrogen powered engines, who now work on the battery engines. Even though there are smaller companies on the market with all the same capabilities, which are trying to do the same thing, they do not have the longevity in the game like Wrightbus.
“We have worked with electric buses for 15 years and hydrogen for over ten, so we are more than qualified in the technical department to be offering a ten year warranty on each bus we repower,” said Jean-Marc. Plus, while having the engine changed from a diesel to an electric, the bus can also have a face-lift, and any repairs fixed in the company’s refurb shop.
European expansion
Every country in Europe has the same issue in that it wants to remove or cut down its large fleets of diesel buses on the roads. “A facility like this one in Bicester, is 45,000 sq. ft. and is a low investment compared to what it would be to build a new electric bus manufacturing facility, and this allows us to expand inexpensively,” said Jean-Marc.
As mentioned, the company is intending on opening a second facility in the UK, but also expand into Germany, France and Benelux over the next three years. “After that we will look at other regions as well.” Another bus market that is global is school buses which are predominately still diesel and are used daily around the world.
Due to having existing customers, Wrightbus has already built connections that its new electric engines can be sold in to. “Our customers in Singapore have already asked us to look at their existing fleets and in Hong Kong, they have the same number of buses as London and a market of similar size, making it another area we can expand in to,” he said.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Wrightbus has opened its NewPower facility in Bicester, the heartland of automotive, to decarbonise fleets of buses by replacing diesel engines with electric power trains
- The cost of repowering a bus is less than half of what it would cost for a new electric bus to be manufactured, and the process only takes three weeks instead of the nine-to-12 months for a new bus to be manufactured
- The process is simple and requires minimal modifications to the bus, besides fitting the new engines. The process is also green, ensuring any parts removed from the buses go back to the fleet for spares and repairs
- The company is planning on increasing its employees from 22 to 60 by the end of the year to keep up with demand. Despite the sectors skills shortage, Wrightbus believes it is in the right location for this
- Wrightbus CEO, Jean-Marc Gales, plans on expansion in the UK, Germany, France and Benelux over the next three years, as well as other continents such as Asia
