The Polish bus manufacturer Solaris celebrated this month its 30th anniversary. Thirty years ago, the very first low-floor bus rolled out of the company's factory in Bolechowo, Poland. Back then with only 35 employees, Solaris produced 56 buses in a whole year. The company is one of the first European bus manufacturers to invest in electric buses. And now it started on a large scale with its program to replace tired batteries on older electric buses.
Many in the bus industry shook their heads in shock when Solaris' founder and then CEO Krysztof Olszewski declared at the company's press conference at the IAA trade fair in Hanover in the autumn of 2006: "Diesel is dead. The future is electric." Last year, Solaris delivered 1,631 buses, of which 1,222 were fossil-free buses. The company was third in Europe last year in terms of electric and fuel cell buses delivered, with 13.7 percent of a total of 8,042 newly registered such buses. In December last year Solaris launched the "Zero-emission vehicle retrofit", offering replacement of batteries
and modernisation of energy storage systems on their older buses. Solaris announced it has already orders for replacing batteries on a total of 170 older electric buses, from which 105 in Berlin (Germany). They will receive new battery packs with a capacity of 400 to 500 kWh and also other electrical components will be upgraded. The Berlin operation will take two years. The retrofit program focuses on just over 1,300 electric buses that Solaris delivered between 2013 and 2019. The service applies not only to battery-powered buses, but also to trolleybuses with batteries.