TWINKLING EV FOR CHARITY
E-BUSES HEADED FOR WALLONIA
TOWARDS CONNECTED TRANSPORT
An electric Mini Cooper wrapped in 2,000 Christmas lights will be touring England to raise £ 50,000 for the MS Trust , Duchenne UK and Alzheimer ’ s Society .
Driven by Nicholas Martin , the Mini will start at its tour at The Lexicon Bracknell . It will also visit Silverstone Circuit in Northamptonshire , Warwickshire , and will end its journey in Blackpool , Lancashire , on 19 December .
“ I just knew last year I had an opportunity to cheer people up ,” Mr . Martin said .
“ I can ’ t wait to get out on the road to spread some festive Mini spirit and raise lots of money for the three charities .”
Mr Martin , whose mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis ( MS ) six years ago , said the charities “ mean a lot ” to him .
Solaris will be supplying 161 Urbino 12 hybrid buses along with an 8-year maintenance service to Wallonia in 2022 .
“ We are extremely proud of this large new order placed by Opérateur de Transport de Wallonie ,” said Petros Spinaris , Member of the Management Board for Sales and After Sales .
“ Since 2017 , we have delivered nearly 240 hybrid buses of this exact same type to the cities of Liège , Hainaut and Charleroi . We are very glad that even more public transport passengers in Wallonia will be able to use state-ofthe-art , low-emission Solaris buses ”.
The tender was issued by Opérateur de Transport de Wallonie ( OTW ), a public transport operator from the Frenchspeaking part of Belgium . The captial of Wallonia will be receiving 46 units of two-door Urbino 12 buses . Meanwhile , the cities of Charleroir and Liege will be receiving 28 units and 39 units respectively of the three-door variant of the hybrid bus .
Currently there are 32 Urbino e-buses serving the residents of Brussels .
BlackBerry Limited and L-SPARK has recently announced the third phase of their join accelerator program in a bid to grow Canadian start-ups focused on connected vehicle solutions .
This year , chosen companies will have access to BlackBerry ’ s Intelligent Vehicle Data Platform – BlackBerry IVY™ , enabling them to develop highimpact solutions leveraging in-vehicle data to improve driver and passenger experiences .
“ After two successful cohorts with L-SPARK we look forward to going to back to the deep talent pool that exists within the Canadian start-up scene to help identify those companies that share our vision : a transportation industry – and in-vehicle experience – transformed by data ,” said Peter Virk , Vice President of IVY Product and Ecosystem , BlackBerry .
“ As we continue to build out a robust ecosystem of services and automotive applications to leverage the rich data insights that BlackBerry IVY provides , we can ’ t wait to see the ideas and use cases that will emerge to help automakers unlock the vast potential of next generation intelligent connected vehicles .”
28 ISSUE 32 OCTOBER 2021 / WWW . AFMA . ORG . AU