London drops the veil on electric double-deckers, will hit roads in April - Roadshow

Enlarge Image

The next time you travel through London on public transportation, you might find your experience to be significantly quieter. No, it's not because you left your earplugs in after waking up. It's because some of the city's buses -- the ubiquitous double-decker ones, at least -- will be fully electric.

Transport for London (TfL), the city's transit authority, on Thursday unveiled its new double-decker bus, built by Chinese auto manufacturer BYD. Each bus costs around £350,000 (that's about a half-million US dollars), and TfL claims it's the first fully electric, double-decker bus in the world. They'll start hitting the road in April.

"For a bus, the largest part of the cost is actually the fuel, so over the long term electric vehicles can give a big cost saving effect," BYD Europe Managing Director Isbrand Ho told the Guardian last year.