The lead-acid battery of an electric minibus has been replaced with a smaller size lithium-ion battery system consisting of standard 12 V modules and a hierarchical battery management system. The minibus has experimentally been tested to show that the reduced battery capacity, which also cuts costs, does not affect the daily operational mission. This is assuming that the driving phases are alternated with fast charging periods. Experiments show that fast charging of 8 min guarantees up to 1 h of operation.