China’s Vision for a Straddling Bus Dissolves in Scandal and Arrests
“Everything we do is approved by related departments in the government,
and if we are an illegal company with financial issues, why are the local governments still interested in us?”
In the fall, as public scrutiny increased, the test track and the huge, 72-foot-long, 16-foot-high prototype fell into disuse.
“Cars under the belly of the big vehicle would have no way to change direction,
and even changing lanes would be dangerous,” The Beijing News said last year.
We are not a briefcase company for illegal fund-raising,” Zhang Wei, the director of development
and planning for TEB Tech, the Huaying Kailai subsidiary that developed the bus, told the reporter.
A Chinese inventor’s plan to develop such a vehicle, called a “traffic-straddling bus,” has been effectively
killed after 32 people from an investment company that backed the project were arrested.
But critics raised many questions, including the expense of installing tracks
and stations, whether tall trucks would get stuck underneath and about the risk to smaller vehicles and pedestrians.