China’s futuristic “straddling bus”, known as the Transit Elevated Bus (TEB-1), has seen doubts cast over its financing and production, days after its inaugural test run in Qinhuangdao city, Hebei Province last week.
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Song has denied the claims insisting that his team “haven’t done anything wrong at all”, adding that “the latest tests show that the bus design is entirely possible”.
August 08-A Chinese company delighted the Internet earlier this year with a proposal for a futuristic “bus” that straddles other vehicles, seemingly solving the twin problems of buses stuck in traffic and stopped buses blocking traffic.
However, claims that the Transit Elevated Bus had made its “real-world debut” with a public test in the city of Qinhuangdao seem a little wide of the mark and accusations that the entire project is a “scam” have been made.
China’s Transit Elevated Bus (TEB) became a reality last week – or did it?
At which the developer company said that the test was part of its internal testing and that a “test run” will be held later on.
Other problems include the fact that the TEB’s designer’s highest level of education was elementary school, most cars will not be able to fit underneath the bus’s 2.1 meter clearance, and the bus itself violates the height limit for vehicles on Chinese roads.
The funding behind it could additionally be illegitimate: the company was potentially “misleading investors and crowdfunding their project illegally”, RT reports. Such fundraising has been controversial in China with gizmodo.co.uk reported that one similar model cheated 900,000 investors out of over NZ$10 billion past year.
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To make matters worse, Shanghaiist reports that a few media outlets claim that the TEB is a fraudulent peer to peer (P2P) investment project aimed at scamming investors.
