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-   -   City Buses of various STUs all over India (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/commercial-vehicles/73524-city-buses-various-stus-all-over-india-42.html)

I agree with the above article totally. The buses are poorly built. Seats are bad. Too much engine noise, no pickup. Digital Boards dont work, and what not. Adding to that, the looks of the buses, out of all the Jnnrum fleet in the nation, Mumbai's buses have the worst looks, whereas the other STU's have moved ahead in terms of looks, Mumbai's BEST buses have moved a little backwards.

Frequent breakdowns, in almost 90% of the cases is more due to lack of maintainanace rather than bad quality. The bad quality may be in one part in 10 breakdowns, not very good I agree, but still nothing that proper maintainance cant solve.

All the STUs need to adapt and train their personnel to handle the latest engines. Even though the engines basically are the same, they have improved leaps and bounds. The techniques and methods of maintainance need to keep pace at the STU workshops.

You would need to add bad driving by the staff as well. Lugging the engine, riding the clutch to increase the RPM, abuse of controls also contribute towards it.

The driver is actually wearing the seat-belt! I have not found a single BMTC Volvo/other buses driver wearing one.

I must say that you've a great pair of eyes my friend! :D

:D

Btw, KSRTC is the reg. name for Karnataka SRTC; how is the Kerala SRTC using that name? No copyright issue?

Attaching a picture of a 2.5 year old BEST bus. The condition of the bus tells the whole story of maintenance. This bus has been "repainted" about year ago. These days the first repaint is meaningless in BEST. The apply thinnest possible layer of paint on less than half the bus.

Secondly I travelled in the hybrid bus today. I will post the details of the journey soon.

Are you sure of this? Both corporations share the name.

OT: I would very much want either of these corporations to change their names to something like
1. Roadways Corporation of Kerala / Karnataka (RCK)
2. Kerala / Karnataka Roadways Corporation (KRC)
3. Kerala / Karnataka Bus lines Corporation (KBC)

The other can keep the other name so that there is no confusion.

I got a short ride in the hybrid yesterday. The bus looks and feels far more upmarket than the normal marcopolos, mainly due to the different Headlamp & tail lamp clusters, bonded glasses & two piece doors that are flush fitted with the rest of the body.

The body is very good in quality. Seats too are different from the normal marcopolos & are more comfortable, with head rests. There are no backside facing seats on the upper level. I found the legroom better than normal marcopolo. No idea how they managed this. The ride also confirmed that the CNG engine of marcopolo is more refined than the diesel version. There are no vibrations at idle. Suspension does not match Kinglongs though.

The bus has an EATON automatic gearbox. It is operated by pressing buttons as against the lever type gearbox of Allison which is found in other marcopolos & Kinglongs. The shifter consists of standard D, N, R buttons. Additionally there is a "low" button, which I guess will keep the bus in lower gears. It also has a "manual" button for switching to manual mode & Up and down buttons for shifting gears in manual mode.

The steering & instrument cluster look fabulous. The instrument cluster even has an MID at the centre! The MID has a blue backlight. It displays many things like speed, various temperatures, etc. A longer ride will be necessary to find out more details about the MID.

The bus starts on electric motor & engine kicks in when the motor is insufficient.

Driver was very cautious, due to which I could not gauge the performance.

@Akshay
Did you experience anything about the initial accelration of the bus from rest? Asking because electric motors can provide full torque from rest.

The steering wheel and instrument cluster(MID included) has been carried over from the Tata Prima trucks. The MIDs are pretty widely configurable to carry a large amount of data, depending on the ECU's and different kinds of sensors present in the vehicle.

The exhaust tail-pipe could have been angled downwards to give the rear more clean looks.

The seats do look pretty nice indeed.

The rear cut-out for the tail-lamp cluster also seems like one that can accomodate the tail-lamps used on the Tata-Hispano buses all over the world. Attaching a picture of that tail-lamp below. Hope to see them in the future.

TML seems to be on a warpath to create large no. of shared components across is CV range to help reduce costs.

@julupani: As I mentioned earlier, driver was very conservative as the buses are new to them. Use of throttle was very less. So there was no chance to assess the performance.

But yes, the bus was starting on motor only. Engine used to kick in after some time. I could also make out the motor in action (in regeneration mode) while braking.

For about 1 km stretch in byelane, the bus ran purely on motor(s) without any assistance from engine.

Does anyone have any idea about the technical specs of the bus? I am curious to know the hp of the engine and motors.

saw the Tata Hybrid bus at Matunga this afternoon, the paintjob looks really cool especially that huge HYBRID sticker, its the toyota prius of the buses!

I think the buses dont actually get direct assistance from the engine in these buses. They are a series hybrid tech buses. Basically the motor only charges the batteries, doesn't give direct power to the wheels. The batteries are maintained at a certain charge level.

@julupani: See the following description:

Source.