Oxford’s Electric Buses -28 years before ZEBRA

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RICHARD SHARMAN

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is no doubt that 2021 has been the year for electric buses, but nearly thirty years prior to ZEBRA funding being announced, Oxford was already operating electric buses. Richard Sharman looks at how the future could have been very different if the battery technology had been as good then as it is today

Multiple batches of zero-emission electric buses have been delivered throughout the UK, but if the battery technology of the 1990s had been up to it, we could have been in a very different position now. As a teenager growing up in Oxford in the 1980s, I was used to the historic buildings echoing the sounds of throaty Leyland Leopard exhausts, and just about every type rear-engined double-decker of that era, and then the smoother sounding Volvo B10Bs, Ford Transits, Ivecos and Dennis Lances during the 1990s.
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