**5. Conclusions**

The promotion of the bus electrification is in full swing in China, among which pure electric bus, with its advantages of high driving stability, zero emission and outstanding economic performance, has become the focus of many cities. However, it can't be denied that electric buses still have some limitations, e.g., short driving range and long charging time, which are tough to overcome in a short time. Besides, compared with traditional bus, pure electric bus is a relatively new concept, with a more complicated process of its selection, deserving more attention and research.

In this article, a test organized by the Nanjing Bus Company that is based on actual road tests to aid in bus selection was illustrated. Compared with other test methods, road tests were used because they are direct and reliable and they take into account actual transport conditions. The process of the tests can be categorized into three steps: (1) To structure the organization of the testing and selection processes, three groups were introduced: a leadership group, working group, and review group. (2) The test process and test conditions, including bus, route, staff and environmental information were provided for data collection. (3) As for the indicator processing, power consumption per 100 km, charging duration per 100 km, daily average driving distance and failure time per 100 km were determined to be key factors in the selection of a suitable bus.

In general, it is critical for the bus companies to decide to purchase the buses, and thus, the performance, cost, safety, environment and other indicators of electric buses with the support of operation data and the goal of normal operation service are of great significance to be quantified, the method proposed in this paper the bus company applied to make progress in electric bus selection thereby proves the application value, in terms of both process and indicators. In addition, since the test is based on the new buses, it is worth exploring the subsequent performance in the practical operation in the future research.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, J.G. and J.H.; methodology, J.G. and J.H.; investigation, C.C. and H.Z.; data curation, C.C.; writing—original draft preparation, C.C. and X.Y.; writing—review and editing, M.K. and Z.H. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51778141, 71874067) and Henan science and technology project (Grant No.182102310733).

**Acknowledgments:** The authors would like to thank Nanjing Bus Company for providing essential data and support. Their assistance is gratefully acknowledged.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
