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Future Transport Systems (FTS) wrote a successful £11.5m bid to the Technology Strategy Board’s Ultra Low Carbon Vehicle Demonstrator Program to accelerate the development of 35 vehicles and deploy them in the North East over a period of 4 years.
Project collaborators are Nissan, Smith Electric Vehicles, AVID, Liberty Electric Cars, Gateshead Council and Newcastle University’s Transport Operations Research Group (TORG). FTS will act on behalf of lead partner, Nissan, to ensure the project meets its milestones and also take responsibility for running the vehicle trials.
Over the course of the project the vehicles will be placed with a cross section of society to capture representative information reflecting how the vehicles perform and how they impact on the behaviour of the users. Running in parallel, ONE North East, the Regional Development Agency will fund the installation of charging infrastructure located to facilitate the requirements of the vehicle users.
Future Transport Systems will work with a broad range of individuals and organisations to place the vehicles, and users will be required to commit to taking part in a program of awareness raising and educational activities designed to help expand the market for electric vehicles in the North East.
Vehicles will carry GPS, data collection and transmission technology to enable real time data to be collected and analysed by TORG.
The fleet of vehicles will include 15 of Nissan’s new Leaf cars, Smith Electric Vehicles’ conversions of 5 LTI Taxis, 10 Ford Connects, 1 Edison Executive minibus, 2 Liberty Electric Range Rovers and 2 AVID electric cars.