Today marks the 10th anniversary of Go-Ahead London’s first trials of an electric bus service, with a short loop route to test how the buses performed.
(c) Go-Ahead London
The first electric service was a trial using two single decker buses supplied by BYD and ran out of the Waterloo depot on Go-Ahead London’s routes 507 and 521 serving Victoria, Waterloo and London Bridge stations.
Those first buses ran on 18th December 2013 – a decade ago, and in August 2016, the first of 51 electric buses arrived to replace the rest of the diesel-based buses on those routes.
Since then, the fleet has expanded, and Go-Ahead London now operates 520 zero emission buses on behalf of TfL and expects to increase this number to 1,000 by the end of 2026 – accounting for almost half the company’s fleet. Go-Ahead London says that it has delivered a saving of 40,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions over the past decade, equivalent to taking 24,000 cars off the road.
David Cutts, Managing Director, Go-Ahead London, said: “It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years since our first electric bus hit the road. The technology has developed at a rapid pace and electric buses are rapidly become the norm, rather than the exception, on London’s streets.”
Across the UK as a whole, The Go-Ahead Group operates 670 zero emission buses and is shortly to deploy an additional 106 electric vehicles in Oxford, part funded by the Government’s ZEBRA scheme.
Neither of those two trial buses are in service anymore, but one of them is on display at the London Bus Museum in Weybridge.
https://www.londonbusmuseum.com/2013-byd-electric-bus-eb2/
All TfL buses newly-registered since October 2020 are now either battery electric or – if you travel on route 7 – fuel cell electric (hydrogen). A handful of diesels and hybrids may well be clinging to London bus routes in another 10 years but you’d likely have to look them up to ride on one.