Phoenix Motor Inc.’s PhoenixEV, a manufacturer of electric buses, delivered five 40-foot ZX5 battery electric buses in May 2024 for the University of California, Irvine (UCI). This achievement marks a major step for PhoenixEV in providing universities with reliable and sustainable transportation solutions.
UCI has had an electric fleet since January 2018 and is the first university in the U.S. to go all-electric. Since then, UCI has added 25 buses to its fleet and logged 1,183,210 miles. Also, bus ridership for the 2023-24 academic year was 1,464,378 while annually hitting 184,938 miles and averaging 3,555 miles weekly.
The buses are charged using UCI’s state-of-the-art microgrid, which consists of an internal utility tunnel loop connected to the local utility via an on-campus substation. The internal utility loop spans around the campus and connects the community of over 30,000 people to various distributed energy resources, including charging stations for each of the new Anteater Express buses. Also, charging the fleet costs only $0.37 per mile compared with the $1.53 per mile that would be spent with diesel.
“PhoenixEV is proud of our partnership with UCI,” says Denton Peng, CEO of PhoenixEV. “UCI is a forward-thinking university dedicated to sustainable transportation for their students and community, and we are delighted to be a strategic electric bus partner with UC Irvine.”