GILLIG has announced that its 40-foot battery electric bus has received the highest recorded score for reliability and safety in the Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA) Bus Test Program at the LarsonTransportation Institute’s Bus Research and Testing Center in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
These tests evaluate how well buses perform under conditions that simulate a transit vehicle’s duties.
To be eligible for purchase with federal grant funding, such as the recently awarded 1.66 billion USD in FTA grants, all buses must meet or exceed performance minimums.
The testing assesses key performance areas, such as maintainability, reliability, safety, structural integrity, noise, fuel economy and emissions.
With a score of 89.5 out of 100, GILLIG’s battery electric bus passed all performance tests and significantly exceeded the minimum standards. This score also broke the previous highest records for reliability and safety performance.
Ben Grunat, VP of Product Planning and Strategy, GILLIG said:We talk a lot about 'quality without compromise' here at GILLIG. These scores demonstrate exactly what that means; our product being the safest and most reliable Zero Emission Bus on the market is not our goal. Rather, it's GILLIG's standard.
During more than 15,000 miles of testing, the GILLIG bus required only 15.2 repair hours of unscheduled maintenance. In comparison, other battery electric buses tested at Altoona over the last seven years have needed an average of 72.3 hours of repair time to complete testing.
In addition, the GILLIG vehicle received the highest-recorded score in the critical braking test, which measures stopping distance.
