Busworld brought signs of growing interest in hydrogen fuel-cell technology — still regarded as forbiddingly expensive until production volumes increase — with the potential to deliver the range of a diesel bus and using a fuelling process that is only marginally slower. This is the technology that newly rescued Wrightbus hopes to sell in the UK and abroad.
Arguably the most ambitious of those on display — winner of Busworld’s bus ecology award and its Grand Award for the best bus in the show — was one of eight tram-style Van Hool Exqui.City 18.6m bendybuses that Keolis will operate in the south-western French city of Pau.
This is the first bus rapid transit (BRT) line to be operated solely with hydrogen vehicles, each of which carries 125 passengers (most of them standing), has four double-width doors and can be fully refuelled in 10min for a range of approximately 300km (185miles). Lithium batteries and electric motors provide supplementary power.
Although this is its first application of the technology in the Exqui.City — which also comes as a diesel or gas hybrid, battery electric, inductive or conductive charged on-route battery electric, and a trolleybus — Van Hool has built 130 hydrogen fuel-ce…
