Purely electric operation is the aim, not hybrid. There are plenty of electric bus routes across Europe if you know where to find them, plus they've had a lot of experience with off-wire running of trolleybuses on batteries. I think they know well what's involved, as do the Chinese. Even in Sydney there is a very busy operation at Sydney airport that moves 2 million people per year, 20 hours a day, constant stop-start and air-conditioned. It's been successful enough and with much lower operating and maintenance costs that they're buying lots more of these buses now to replace their diesels. If there are problems with batteries they wouldn't be making such a big investment. I think the technology will come good.

Some European city agencies have set a date for total electrification like 2020 and so on. Prague hasn't done this so far. There will inevitably be a transition period as existing buses serve out their life cycle. It will also depend on what sort of deal a city has on electricity. Prague has a very good one for their metro and trams and the charging infrastructure for these buses will generally run off the 600v tram supply.

There's also this:

https://phys.org/news/2017-04-lithium-reviving-centuries-old-czech-tradition.html https://phys.org/news/2017-04-lithium-reviving-centuries-old-czech-tradition.html

Tony P
---InTramsDownUnder@..., <matthew@...> wrote : Multiple battery failures will not help matters on this front - the
battery packs in their hybrids keep dying, so going 100% electric is
quite a leap of faith if your hybrids don't work properly.

And I kept an eye out for electric vehicals on by recent trip, and
electric buses are 'rare as hens teeth', I don't think I saw any in
Germany at all. I saw many Tesla and Nissan Leaf electric cars - and
public charging points for them. I don't think I saw one pure battery
electric bus. (Ignoring trolley buses, I saw quite a number of those!).

The duty cycle for an urban route bus is punishing and I suspect it's
going to be quite a few years before pure battery electric can hold it's
own. The electrics will only succeed in jurisdictions were the operator
gets subsidized on the costs of extra vehicals so they can give them
less punishing diagrams than the diesel/gas buses are subjected to, but
keep the service levels up.

I do wonder how many hours a day are Melbourne trams out on the road and
how this compares with the buses in the same city.

I know people have collected driver diagrams - does any one collect
'vehicle' diagrams ?