According to Shawn Furman, Sales Manager for Optimal EV’s transit business, who spoke to T&BB at the latest ACT Expo, the company has preferred to keep a low profile over the last couple of years, especially given the bad press which EVs are receiving. While competitors such as Lightning eMotors have gone under, Optimal EV has been quietly working away on its main offerings, an electric chassis-cab and a battery electric low floor shuttle bus.

Media reports from 4 July were corroborated by an announcement on Sunsundegui’s website; T&BB reached out to Volvo, which confirmed the reports but provided no further comment.

Almost one year on from pilot production, May 2024 saw VWCO in collaboration with Volkswagen Argentina start series production of four truck models and a bus chassis in Argentina.

Having purchased the full “e-package solution,” Daimler installed 41 charging stations (output of 360 kW) with a total number of 122 charging points at the depot. The result, up to four buses per charging station can be charged overnight at 90 kW. The supply agreement also includes maintenance and charging management software.

The new warehouse is intended to improve logistics and production at the site, where aluminium doors, automatic door systems, and ramps and lifts are made for buses, coaches, and trains.

This validation operation is to start in the city of Curitiba, the city of Volvo’s Latin America headquarters and where the chassis is being manufactured.

Located in Byhalia, a town located in Marshall County (just on the Mississippi-Tennessee border near Memphis), the five-hundred-acre site will accommodate a two-million-square-foot plant by 2027.

Already in production since late 2023 for delivery to São Paulo, the eO500U is designed, developed and built at the company’s facilities in ABC Paulista, São Caetano do Sul.

Wrightbus says that, in as little as three weeks, NewPower will take a mid-life diesel bus and convert it to zero emissions (battery or fuel cell).

Among the most requested modifications in 2023 were to the light VW Delivery 4x4 truck model, and the Volksbus bus chassis.

Somewhere in the industrial estate of a small city in western Poland, there is a charging station which was installed by me. The site of the installation was near the headquarters of Ekoenergetyka, the manufacturer of the charging station in question, and the hosts of a conference which brought together several hundred guests involved or interested in the development of Europe’s charging infrastructure. The event, organised by an industry association called CharIn, was the third such conference and “testival” to have taken place in Europe since 2023.

Approximately 360,000 square feet of the existing plant, which measures 1.42m square feet, will be given over to the ‘Accelera’ zero emission brand.