ISE Corporation started designing, developing and testing electric and hybrid-electric drive systems for heavy duty vehicles over 12 years ago. For the first eight years, the company built approximately 40 different prototype electric and hybrid electric vehicles. The majority of these were transit bus drive systems with other efforts focused on trucks and aircraft tow tractors. Currently, there are over 5 million miles on 117 vehicles delivered since 1995. In late 1993, the hybrid bus market began to really take off in the United States. Although one hybrid manufacturer had previously acquired a large order around the year 2000, only small groups of prototypes had been purchased until about three years ago. These prototypes performed well, demonstrated good reliability, were certified at low emission levels, and obtained better fuel economy. New and different components for hybrids included different engines, generators, micro-turbines, fuel cells, motors, inverters, batteries, ultracapacitors, air conditioning, hydraulic systems, pneumatic systems, and vehicle controllers. These different systems provided ISE the opportunity to perform real world comparisons of drive systems performance in varying applications or duty cycles. ISE used this data to optimize drive system solutions and prepare for what was to be a fast growing demand for hybrid drive systems in transit buses. As of April 2007 ISE has over 100 gasoline series hybrid-electric drive systems in transit buses that are in daily revenue service. These buses have accumulated over four million miles with 94% availability. 47 of these buses are in daily service at Long Beach Transit and have accumulated over 3 million miles. By the end of 2008 there may be over 200 gasoline hybrid-electric transit buses in service. All of these series hybrid systems use ultracapacitor energy storage and Siemens ELFA motor/generator components.
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