Recently the capacitor technology has been getting more and more attention in industry,For low power applications,especially in computers and telecommunications,the selection criteria and availability have been discussed and summarized.For traction motor drive applications,the life expectancy of dc bus capacitor has been discussed.With a successful development of using a newly developed low-inductance hign-current film capacitor in a high power(75kW)traction motor drive,the intemtion of this paper is to provide the theoretical background and field experimental data for a potentially better dc bus capacitor design option.