100 MAN Lion’s City buses with CNG engine hit the streets of Paris
Delivery of a total of 100 natural gas powered MAN Lion’s City solobuses for public transport in Paris is in full swing. The Parisian public transportation company Régie autonome des transports Parisiens (RATP) is utilizing a range of the available drive types and lengths of the successful MAN model to transport its passengers reliably, in an environmentally friendly way and at the lowest possible costs.
“The challenges for operators are growing and call for new, sustainable mobility concepts. What is needed are innovative solutions. We are convinced that city buses powered by natural gas or biogas engines can make a hugely important contribution to environmentally friendly public transport”, said Rudi Kuchta, Head of Business Unit Bus at MAN Truck & Bus. “As we move towards lower emissions in city centers, efficient drives using alternative fuels will be massively important. That is why natural gas technology has been an important part of the MAN portfolio of alternative drives in the city bus sector for many years.”
“The fact that the Paris transportation company has once again chosen MAN vehicles with natural gas drives clearly demonstrates how satisfied RATP is with our natural gas buses in particular and with our city buses as a whole. Almost a quarter of the Parisian fleet is made up of state-of-the-art MAN buses, more than 1,000 vehicles in total”, he added.
As well as the French capital, local transport provider VWG Oldenburg put into service 15 new MAN Lion’s City 12 G with MAN EfficientHybrid for the biogas fleet. The urban transport provider in Northern Germany is one of the pioneers in natural gas technology and is committed to sustainable mobility: in 2004, when the decision was made that only scheduled services buses powered by natural gas would be used in subsequent years, MAN already had a presence in the market with suitable vehicle types.
Then, four years ago, VWG Oldenburg converted its entire fleet of 112 scheduled-service buses to natural gas, including a large number of MAN Lion’s City G models. In addition, biomethane has been in use since 2013. Thus, on balance the VWG fleet in Oldenburg is almost CO2 neutral, saving around 9,500 tons of greenhouse gases per year.
Natural gas versions of the MAN Lion’s City are also used in public transportation in many other cities throughout Europe. With the launch of the new generation of city buses, they are now available with the innovative E18 engine series: “We have put our decades of know-how into the development of a completely new gas engine, which is exceptionally efficient and has extremely low exhaust emissions. When the E18 engine is combined with the MAN EfficientHybrid module, it can be operated even more economically”, explained Kuchta.
