A current trial being conducted by TfL and the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) has been taking place in Milton Keynes (United Kingdom) for six months and has so far proved successful.
‘It’s going very well in Milton Keynes,’ said Denis Naberezhnykh, TRL’s head of low carbon vehicle and ITS technology. ‘There is a combination of new technologies in there – chargers and new buses. It’s all being integrated for the first time and so the reliability is improving all the time.’
London is one of six locations around Europe where different types of electric bus technologies are being trialled, as part of a large European project called ZeEUS (Zero Emission Urban Bus Systems). London, however, is the only city to be using wireless power transfer.
‘The latest information that we have is that three vehicles are going to be launched in September. The point is to see how they cope as part of a regular route. They’ll be in operation among all the other buses and subjected to the same kind of load and time schedules,’ said Naberezhnykh.
