THANK you to Dr Hazel Dawe (Letters, February 16) for her further comments relating to electric buses.

The Oxford Bus Company is delighted by the £1.7m grant to help upgrade five of our City Sightseeing buses to electric and retrofit 78 other vehicles in the city, including 61 of our vehicles, to ultra-low emission status. I appreciate Dr Dawe’s sentiment to have a fully electric bus fleet in Oxford by 2025, but technology is not ready. I’ve now personally explained the reasons why to Dr Dawe at a recent meeting.
This is a complex project and we do not expect to see our electric tour buses on the road until late 2018, at the earliest. Our tour buses were selected because they operate shorter journeys and are out for a more limited time.

In terms of our ‘front line’ bus network, vehicle range, charging infrastructure costs and grid capacity are all currently prohibitive to a full rollout. If we placed a daily fleet on charge at the same time at our Cowley depot it would risk putting Blackbird Leys into darkness.

Dr Dawe also misunderstood part of my last letter, I did not state all of London’s electric buses are single decker. There are indeed five double deck electric buses in use on service 98, but they are used as ‘extras’ in the Metroline fleet, as part of a trial and can only cover about half of the mileage one of our buses would typically do in a day. Our sister company Go-Ahead London is also running one on service 36, again as an extra in the fleet. TfL have only committed to converting single decker buses in Central London to electric, as technology is not available to run an electric double decker all day without a second or third charge during the day.

Routes in Oxfordshire are longer than in London and therefore the technology will need to be even stronger here. Currently battery life is also unproven, and the environmental impact of the full life cycle of vehicle batteries is not fully understood. However, operating the tour buses will provide greater insight.

Dr Dawe asked why I did not write of the funding in my previous letter. At the time of writing we had not been informed our bid was successful – this was announced by the Government on February 8.

PHIL SOUTHALL
Managing Director
Oxford Bus Company