Solaris ramping up electric bus market share

Last year Solaris delivered 107 electric buses to customers across Europe. According to the Polish-Spanish bus manufacturer, it held a market share of 17% of all electric bus sales in Europe in 2018, the overview shows.

Solaris customers were in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Spain, Germany, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden and Italy, together receiving a total of 107 electric buses.

While this is a success for the company, internal statistics included all competitors. The Solaris market share could only be topped by Chinese giant BYD/ADL, who took 25 per cent of the cake. Following Solaris is VDL with 13 per cent and Yutong with 9 per cent.

Solaris also lists that low-emission or zero-emission vehicles already accounted for 36 per cent of all orders processed by the company in 2018, and forecasts, that “the share of low-emission and zero-emission city buses in the city bus market will increase to 80 per cent in the next 10 years, primarily at the expense of conventional drives”. Against this backdrop, Solaris announced that it plans to gear at least half of its production capacity to the manufacture of clean energy buses in the immediate future.

The Polish manufacturer was bought up by the Spanish CAF Group in September while the Polish government retained 35% ownership.

For the coming year, Solaris is planning two product premieres: the Solaris Urbino 12 hydrogen, a 12-metre-long electric bus with a fuel cell as a range extender will be presented at the UITP World Congress in Stockholm in June; the Solaris Trollino 24 is expected to make its debut at Busworld in Brussels this October. The Solaris Trollino 24 is a prototype trolleybus with a double joint, two drive axles and an oversized length of 24 metres. In the long term, Solaris wants to develop a flexible platform to build the basis for trolleybuses, battery-electric and also hybrid buses.

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