This is the Volkswagen e-BULLI, an official electric bus restomod
Pretty much everyone loves a VW T1 bus, and they should love this one even more because it's electric. [credit: Volkswagen ]
Everyone has different ways of coping with the coronavirus shut-in. People working from home are spicing up their teleconferences with animated backdrops. Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson has grown a beard. And I've been getting even more lazy about reading all the news alert emails that OEMs send me each day, which is why I've only just found out about a new electric Volkswagen bus that's going on sale in Europe. No, it's not the crowd-pleasing ID Buzz-it's called the e-BULLI, and it's an official electric restomod of a classic 1966 VW T1 Samba Bus, the product of a collaboration between VW's commercial vehicles division and a company called eClassics.
(For the uninitiated, a restomod is a "vehicle that has been put back together with the addition of new modern or aftermarket parts that were not on the vehicle when it came from the factory.")
Out goes the 43hp (32kW), 75lb-ft (102Nm) air-cooled flat-four engine, along with the transmission, fuel tank, exhaust, and so on. Instead, the rear wheels are driven by an 81hp (61kW), 156lb-ft (210Nm) electric motor borrowed from the e-up!, an adorable little electric city car that went on sale in Europe in late 2019. As there's more space in a T1 bus than an e-up!, e-BULLI gets the benefit of a slightly bigger lithium-ion battery-in this case, one with 45kWh of useable energy, which is mounted amidships in the bus's floor.
Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments