The society will present late August or early September in Brussels the autobus of the future running with Liquefied Natural Gas.
Thanks to the goverment's economic strategy, Ikarus can produce three thousand vehicles per year, said the owner of Ikarus group Gabor Szeles in an interview for Magyar Hirlap.
Mr Szeles said he is glad that the Hungarian government supports a national production of autobuses because vehicles imported by the Budapest Transportation Center (BKK) won't last as long as Ikarus' that are still the most reliables as several Volvo and Mercedes buses showed technical problems. Moreover, the Budapest Transportation Society (BKV) initially announced that the reparation of those vehicles will cost two million forints each, but noticed during the reparations that the problems are so important that the ammount could increase to twelve million.
„As the energy of the future is the Liquefied Natural Gas, I do not understand why Budapest would like to buy diesel autobuses” said Gabor Szeles, adding that EU financially supports the development of vehicles running with LNG. This new energy is also a cheap one that became a serious concurrent to the Russian traditional natural gas.
Therefore, Ikarus plans an electric autobus with a LNG-filling system permitting a lower time of filling as the vehicle won't contain any electric accumulator.
The objective is to produce three thousand autobuses: two thousand vehicles will be exported and one thousand will stay in Hungary.
There are already four hundred people working on Ikarus' factory in Szekesfehervar but the society will increase the number by recruiting two thousand workers more.
