Evaluation of the Life Cycle Costs for urban buses equipped with conventional and hybrid drive trains

The life cycle cost (LCC) methodology provides understanding of economic aspects of urban buses equipped with different types of propulsion. The LCC analysis delivers the sum of costs related to the acquisition, operation, repair and maintenance disposal as well as the costs for the each bus power train technology. The method allows to take into account all costs for the whole vehicle’s life cycle and creates a precondition for precise information database for decision making. In addition to the economic factors LCC can be extended to environmental aspects such as greenhouse gases emissions. The environmental impacts of the vehicle lifetime may be presented in monetary values. The paper presents the Life Cycle Cost analysis undertaken for urban buses fitted with conventional, series hybrid and parallel hybrid drives. Provided LCC analysis includes the economic and environmental aspects. The paper also delivers the evaluation of the total air pollutant emissions for all stages of lifetime of the each analysed urban bus. The results show that the hybrids have slightly lower life cycle cost than conventional bus. Moreover, hybrid buses were found to have lower life cycle environmental impacts