Born again: Repowering diesel buses for the electric age

It’s an unfortunate irony that the race to adopt greener technology could lead to millions of perfectly serviceable vehicles being scrapped before their time.

While electric powertrains have been proven to deliver lower lifecycle emissions, there’s no getting away from the fact that manufacturing a whole new vehicle and disposing of the old one does carry a hefty environmental penalty – especially when that vehicle is a 12-tonne bus.

Equipmake may have the solution. It’s one of a number of UK companies now offering a ‘repowering’ service, where diesel trucks and buses can be re-fitted with an electric powertrain and given a whole new lease of life.

The Norwich-based firm designs and manufactures the majority of the parts for the conversions in-house, including its own motors and battery packs. It’s also in the process of developing its own silicon carbide inverters, which will soon replace the proprietary items used currently.

“Being able to build our own batteries is quite important,” notes Equipmake founder and managing director, Ian Foley. “We do have a standard battery pack, but quite often we find we need to adapt that to a particular vehicle.”