As electric mobility becomes more important every day, scientific research brings us new solutions that increase performance, reduce financial and economic impacts and increase the market share of electric vehicles. Therefore, there is a necessity to compare technical and economic aspects of different technologies for each transport application. This article presents a comparison of three bus prototypes in terms of dynamic performance. The analysis is based on the collection of real data (acceleration, maximum speed and energy consumption) under different settings. Each developed prototype uses the same bus chassis but relies on different energy storage systems. Results show that the dynamic bus performance is independent on the three energy storage technologies, whereas technologies affect the management costs, charging time and available range. An extensive experimental analysis reveals that the bus equipped with a hybrid storage (lithium-ion batteries and supercapacitors) had the most favorable net present value, in comparison with storage composed of only lead–acid or lithium-ion batteries. This result is due to the greater life of lithium-ion batteries and to the capability of supercapacitors, which reduce both batteries depth of discharge and discharge rate.

The lead-acid battery of an electric minibus has been replaced with a smaller size lithium-ion battery system consisting of standard 12 V modules and a hierarchical battery management system. The minibus has experimentally been tested to show that the reduced battery capacity, which also cuts costs, does not affect the daily operational mission. This is assuming that the driving phases are alternated with fast charging periods. Experiments show that fast charging of 8 min guarantees up to 1 h of operation.

Flash charge systems represent a potentially interesting application for urban transport systems especially if relatively low distances between intermediate stops are recorded. Also this technology assures the complete removal of catenaries or other kind of continuous power collection systems whose usage should be limited in historical or archeological sites. In this work authors describe design, assembly and some preliminary activities concerning a fully working prototype able to demonstrate feasibility and main features of the proposed system.

The Spazia-HPP project proposes a conversion kit called Hybrid Power Pack (HPP) [5] for common microcar; it was installed on a prototype called “Spazia”, a typical quadricycle of the category L6e. It has an internal combustion engine, which allows you to turn common microcar into parallel hybrid thermal – electric vehicle.The aim is to promote a system of easy installation, which increase acceleration by 20% and reduces fuel consumption by almost 25% compared to a traditional Diesel quadricycle. The results are obtained by testing on a chassis dynamometer at the research centre ENEA Casaccia (Rome)