THE INTERNATIONAL REPORT
Sweden: A land of contrasts By Doug Jack
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A tri-axle Scania bus linking Arlanda airport with a nearby town. The third axle steers at low speed for extra maneuverability.
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t is always a pleasure to go to Stockholm, Sweden in the summer. It is a beautiful city built on several islands with a direct outlet to the Baltic Sea. One of my first stops was a conference in which Scania presented its interim report for the first six months of 2013. Scania is quite a cautious and conservative company, taking its time to reach decisions but very rarely getting them wrong. The company has been consistently profitable for many years. Martin Lundstedt succeeded the legendary Leif Östling as president and CEO last year in a seamless transition. Scania concentrates on a range of bus and coach chassis for city, suburban, interurban and luxury applications. It produces a wide variety of two and three-axle models with minimal parts count. Many of the coaches share components with the truck range. Although Scania conducts some aluminumframed city-bus bodywork at a factory in Slupsk in northern Poland, their policy is normally to work with selected bodybuilders around the world. One of the strongest links is with Irizar, not only in Europe but also in Mexico, South America, North Africa and even as far afield as Australia. In South America, Scania has supplied articulated vehicles to a number of Bus Rapid Transit systems in cities such as Bogota. It was interesting to hear Martin Lundstedt say that Scania will be ramping up production in two stages in the third and fourth quarters. There had been a drop in the very important Brazilian market, when it changed from Euro 3 to Euro 5, but that’s now recovering strongly. Scania thought that some customers in Europe might try to buy ahead while Euro 5 is still available, but they would have to be quick. Although Euro 6 engines are more complicated, they are showing significant savings in fuel economy. While I would describe Scania as a safe pair of hands on bus and coach strategy, two parts of their
BUSRIDE | SE P T EMBER . 2013
policy surprise me. Firstly, the company continues to adhere strongly in Stockholm to ethanol as an alternative fuel. While it offers very clean emissions, I have never been able to find out the equivalent of a well-to-wheel cost. Ethanol is produced locally in Sweden from the sap of the extensive timber industry and must be taxed at or around 0 percent. Ethanol requires onboard fuel tanks over one and a half times larger than those for diesel buses, and engines tend to run hotter than diesel. Ethanol must also contain a small percentage of diesel to help with initial ignition. Scania says that ethanol can also be produced from renewable crops, particularly in countries like Brazil. It is clear that in Europe, however, the use of ethanol is restricted by the lack of distribution facilities. The normal average life of a bus or coach in Sweden is around seven years. Vehicles are generally maintained to high standards and find a ready market across the Baltic and in other parts of central Europe. Some of the earliest low floor Scania ethanol buses were still running in Stockholm. They must be at least 15 years old, suggesting that there is no second-hand market for them. The other area where Scania lags behind its European competitors is in the development of hybrid buses. Scania feels that hybrid solutions will be financially viable as soon as an economic and dependable solution is available for storing energy on-board a vehicle. Scania believes that neither batteries nor super capacitors have evolved sufficiently to provide
Scania built a small trial fleet of ethanol hybrid buses for service in Stockholm.
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