The project BESTBUS: Battery pack life-Enhanced Solutions Tailored for e-BUS, has in one of its fronts the enhancement of battery lifetime up to 15 years. Such achievement is targeted in the project by usage and concept optimizations at different energy magnitude units, such as modules, packs and cells. In the context of the latter, this work presents a multi-chemistry approach focused on how the capacity and power degradation are influenced by cell format and a broad range of cycling parameters, in close-to-real conditions usage. For that, instead of simple constant current charge/discharge profiles, synthetic and simplified bus drive cycles are employed in the test matrix. In addition, new generation high energy LFP/Gr and NMC/SiGr commercial cells, tungsten inert gas welded tab connections, insulated rigs and active base cooling complete the experimental set in relevant conditions. With such display, the simplified synthetic drive cycle (SSDC) protocol is then modified in terms of environmental temperature, charge power, discharge power (base and/or peak) and regenerative braking during simulated bus journeys. Those individual changes in the SSDC protocol result in different energy and capacity retentions of the cell, that are further exploited in reference performance tests and dissected into degradation modes: loss of Li inventory, loss of active material and impedance rise, through incremental capacity analysis and differential voltage analysis. Simultaneously, temperature is monitored at sections of the cell with different distances to the cooling plate to capture eventual temperature gradients due to the cooling. Therefore, the cycling parameters are comprehensively related to how the cells degrade, allowing the formulation of optimized cells usage.