Electric power-train firm eyes China's buses ENVIRONMENT

Adura CEO Marvin Bush takes the engineering prototype vehicle for a spin around the parking lot of their Menlo Park laboratory. Adura, a Silicon Valley company, makes powertrains for electric buses. They use multiple battery modules instead of one large battery. less Adura CEO Marvin Bush takes the engineering prototype vehicle for a spin around the parking lot of their Menlo Park laboratory. Adura, a Silicon Valley company, makes powertrains for electric buses. They use ... more Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Electric power-train firm eyes China's buses 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

More than a million buses ply China's streets and rural roads, burning diesel and spewing soot and greenhouse gases into the air.

Marvin Bush wants to electrify them.

His Menlo Park startup, Adura Systems, has developed an electric power train for buses and other heavy-duty vehicles. A vehicle's power train contains all the components that generate power and deliver it to the wheels.

Adura, running in stealth mode since its founding two years ago, has signed a testing agreement with a Chinese technology center that helps set the country's standards for automotive equipment. Adura also is negotiating with a Chinese bus manufacturer interested in the technology.

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With Adura's power train, a bus can travel 100 miles between charges, Bush said. Hook up the power train to a hybrid engine, and a bus traveling 130 miles in a day can get fuel mileage of 50 miles per gallon.

Bush has no interest in building the buses himself. While other companies are trying to design entire electric vehicles, Adura has focused on just this one critical piece.

"We only do power trains," Bush said. "We're not going to do any body work. We're not a car company."

Adura, whose name means "to kindle" in Latin, may have found a key niche within the fast-growing world of electric and hybrid vehicles. The company's power train can fit in a number of different vehicle designs and work with engines burning multiple fuels. And Adura isn't the only company exploring this business. Tesla Motors of San Carlos wants to sell electric power trains, in addition to its luxury electric sports cars.

"If you're invested in electric drivetrains, you don't have to place all your bets on hydrogen, or batteries or any particular fuel," said Roland Hwang, a vehicles specialist with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

And while few people get excited about buses, they remain the world's workhorses of public transportation. Running them on electricity - or a combination of electricity and diesel in the case of hybrids - would help clear the air.

"It's important to clean them up in terms of smog and greenhouse gas emissions, both in the United States and worldwide," said Spencer Quong, senior vehicles engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Buses can be dirty."

Installing Adura's technology in all 1.3 million buses in China would cut their tailpipe emissions by 6.1 billion tons each year, Bush said. That includes greenhouse gases, soot and other pollutants.

Rather than a single, massive battery, Adura's power train uses a series of battery "modules," as many as 10 per bus. The number of modules can be changed depending on the needs of the specific vehicle. And if one of the modules breaks down, the others will keep the bus running without interruption. The power train's name - MESA, short for Modular, Electronic, Scalable Architecture - comes from that design.

"Instead of this glob of batteries, we've built intelligent battery packs," Bush said.

That approach fits Bush's background, which lies in the semiconductor industry rather than Detroit. He founded Adura after kicking around ideas with several General Motors engineers, and won financial backing from New Frontier Renewable Energy, a green-tech fund that develops wind farms.

Although Adura has not begun full-scale manufacturing, Bush said the company should be able to sell the power trains for $155,000 apiece. Other hybrid-diesel power trains now sell for more than $180,000, he said.

Adura's price is well above the $55,000 to $75,000 that regular bus power trains cost, Bush said. But China's government, which is trying to develop green technology and cut its dependence on oil, has shown an interest. Adura signed an agreement last May with the China Automotive Technology and Research Center to test the power train in China. Testing there should begin within the next 12 months.

That concerns Hwang, who wants the U.S. government to become more active in pursuing similar technologies.

"There's a question of whether the United States is going to fall behind in the race for electric vehicles and electric drivetrain components," he said.