Voith delivers 1,000th electric bus drive to Great Britain

Voith has already delivered over 1,000 electric drives for buses in Great Britain. British bus manufacturers Alexander Dennis and Wrightbus rely on the electric drive concept VEDS (Voith Electrical Drive System) for their battery and fuel cell electric buses.

Voith claims that its VEDS is “demonstrably” 20 per cent more efficient than comparable competitors. The company is referring to a certification process carried out by the non-profit organisation Zemo Partnership for the two bus models GB Kite Electroliner and StreetDeck Electroliner from Wrightbus.

The 1,000 VEDS delivered are used by Alexander Dennis (ADL) and Wrightbus, but the larger customer is the one from Northern Ireland. According to its Director of Engineering, Robert Best, Wrightbus plans to equip more than 1,000 vehicles with the VEDS alone by 2025.

However, ADL is also likely to become more important in the future. The company initially built the Enviro400EV double-decker in cooperation with BYD – the Chinese supplied the battery and the drive, and ADL the chassis. In 2022, ADL presented a new Enviro400EV developed in-house – with an electric drive from Voith. Since the model has only been available to order since November 2023, the quantities are still significantly lower than for Wrightbus.

However, Voith admits that the success of the VEDS is also due to the British funding landscape. As a result of the ZEBRA scheme, the UK registered more electric buses than anywhere else in Europe in 2023. Of 2,554 single and double-decker buses, 1,150 were purely electric (BEV or FCEV). And many of them are fitted with a drive system from Germany.

voith.com