Two trailblazing buses make their debut in Barcelona under the ZeEUS project

Barcelona recently hosted the presentation of two electric articulated buses that will be running on the Catalan capital’s streets in the second phase of the ZeEUS Projec (Zero Emission Urban Bus System). The main aim of this European initiative, in which GMV is participating, is to demonstrate the economic, environmental and social viability of electric urban buses.

The ZeEUS project (Zero Emission Urban Bus System) with 22.5-million-euro, three-and-a- half-year project is part of the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (7^th FP) for Research and Technological Development. The International Association of Public Transport (UITP) is coordinating this innovating project to extend the fully electric solution to a wider part of Europe’s urban bus networks.

The ZeEUS consortium includes companies and institutions such as Eurelectric, Vatenfall, Volvo and Skoda. Spanish partners include Endesa, Transportes Metropolitanos de Barcelona (TMB), Universidad Politécnica de Catalunya, Idiada, Irizar, GMV and Enide.

Barcelona’s demonstration project, held on 21 September, involved the first wholly electric, 18-meter-long buses ever run on Spain’s roads. They will be able carry about 110 passengers and will soon be brought onto Barcelona’s H16 line.

The project got underway in 2013 and consists of a series of intensive pilot schemes with state-of-the-art electric buses or plug-in hybrid buses in ten different cities, with the idea of driving research and innovation in clean technology applicable to urban transport. The conclusions drawn from ZeEUS will serve for drawing up guidelines and developing tools for the introduction of electric buses in other European cities.

As part of the project GMV will be fitting TMB’s new Solaris Urbino electric buses with onboard equipment capable of recording the most important running data.

On the basis of all this behavioral and performance data, recorded and monitored by GMV’s onboard equipment, an analysis will then be made of certain indicators to help make decisions about the use of this public-transport propulsion technology.

In a future phase GMV will be developing the services to enable use of the bus data recorded in specific TMB tools; this will then favor analysis of the performance of the various vehicles on all the lines where the new vehicles are to be deployed.