Cargo trols scurry autobahn

Germany novelty for a major crisis: the supply trucks, a solution for expensive fuel, pollution, noise. Siemens project "E-highway" will be offered simultaneously, and the United States.

They make probably the best car, but will soon drive them autobahns cargo trolleys! Schwab's is a Schwab, so it always looks so ušpara one euro cent. And when oil is expensive, solution is good old-wire ...

German giant "Siemens", a big name in the global rail technology, is now considering the idea that the above highways set contact network, which would-powered - trucks. Two "Mercedes" trucks are already equipped with a pantograph, as trains and trams. When the wires above the road, drive them to power, and when no wire, including the diesel-engine.


Federal Ministry for the Environment sees in this project no small environmental benefit, and paid the "Siemens" more than two million euros in aid. For that money is made on the test track outdated military airfield near Berlin.

"Siemens" announces a number of benefits from its "e-highway," as he called the new transport system: the elimination of pollution from the transportation of goods into local areas, significantly reducing noise level, then the savings due to the high cost of diesel, as well as cheaper maintenance , since the electric motors will last longer than those on the internal combustion engine.

Road vehicles are powered by electricity "overhead" have long proved useful in the form of trolleybuses. In Germany, however, this form of public transport there are only three small town. Strong networks are dismantled in another era, when for unknown reasons, people were convinced that oil will be forever, and at low prices.

Money is the trump card, and critics of the idea that the wires over-wire roads all over Germany. Government Council for the Environment made ​​the estimate: contact network of major national transportation arteries (highways A1 - A9) would cost about 15 billion euros. This is ten times more than the current largest infrastructure project in the country, rewriting the overpass above the highway.

Perhaps 15 billion and is the sum of that in rich countries so should freeze the hair of the July sun. California has just adopted a plan to fast track the construction of Los Angeles - San Francisco for $ 68 billion ... But the Germans like to save, and from every walk of life get the most profit, with minimal losses and friction. Germans do not have the "breadth" of imperial nations (including Serbs and often!), To throw resources and wealth, "because they can." And the frown, and when to invest a lot - that would convince them that, save.

Moreover, the journal "Der Spiegel", while an ordinary truck costs 90,000 euros, this hybrid, diesel-electric would be twice as expensive. That only half of the existing German trucks could move the power, you should invest eight billion euros ...

If not (re) calculate the Germans, Americans might want - the reason people in the "Siemens". They will therefore pilot project "e-highway" and run in two locations in California, in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.