Victory Liner Inc. said it will undertake an electric bus development program.
“This is our way of helping change the way transport service is delivered in the country. We want to show the public that ‘clean’ transport is possible,” Jan Kierulf, Victory Liner director for research and development said.
Established in 1945, Victory Liner operates around 1,000 buses that run on diesel. The bus company started research on electric buses as early as 2004 in Santa Barbara, California.
The bus that Victory Liner is developing overseas uses hybrid technology, which enables on-board charging and so the bus doesn’t have to stop along the way to re-charge. Also, it requires no special charging infrastructure.
The company aims to run eight such electric buses within the year at a cost of around P12 million each compared with P6 million for a diesel-fed unit. To reduce costs, the bus firm plans to develop the electric buses in the country.
Kierulf said having local assembly operations would generate hundreds of jobs, adding that a new industry could come out of this.
“Given the right regulatory environment and government assistance, we believe the Philippines can even become an exporter of electric buses in the future. This is something that we should aspire for. Even now, we already have competencies in body construction. We can construct bodies of buses and even trains. We also have a very capable partner for this,” the executive said.
A unit of Victory Liner, Newgen Electric Technologies will provide the technical support for the installation of equipment in, troubleshooting, and maintenance of the electric buses. The company will likewise undertake studies on electric bus manufacturing processes to enable the local assembly of such vehicles.
Newgen Electric will focus on retrofitting existing diesel-fed buses with the necessary equipment to convert them into electric units.
Victory Liner’s electric bus development program is part of a Public-Private Partnership deal with the government.
Under the memorandum of agreement signed with the Climate Change Commission, the government will provide technical know-how and promote electric vehicles developed locally.
Mary Ann Lucille Sering, Climate Change Commission vice chair, said the first of its kind PPP would allow the government to showcase a viable electric-vehicle program to the transport sector, whose greenhouse gas emissions “are even bigger than the energy sector.”
