Intercity greening: How Scottish firm Ember is creating zero emissions travel
A Scottish business has created the only all-electric intercity coach service in the UK
The journey begins quietly, with no engine hum. The driver chats amiably to a passenger adjusting his reclining seat as the vehicle pulls away from a stop on Edinburgh’s George Street.
Welcome to the 9.21am coach service from the Scottish capital to Dundee, powered entirely by electric batteries. It’s operated by Ember, a young business based in Scotland that has created the only all-electric intercity coach service in the UK.
The Edinburgh-Dundee route was the first offered when Ember launched in 2020 offering zero emissions travel, round trip, on a single battery charge.
Routes added since include Dundee to Glasgow, Aberdeen to Edinburgh, and Glasgow to Fort William, pitting Ember against established operators Scottish CityLink, Stagecoach, National Express and a recent entrant from Germany, FlixBus.
For co-founders Keith Bradbury and Pierce Glennie – who swapped careers in fintech in London to start Ember – the idea was simple: decarbonise one of the most polluting sectors of transport while improving the often-miserable intercity coach travel experience.
“We’d been following electrification for some years and had seen what Tesla had done for cars,” explains Manchester-born Bradbury in the Georgian townhouse in Charlotte Square that serves as Ember’s operational headquarters. The 43-year-old is dressed in Silicon Valley casual: T-shirt, slacks and baseball cap. Behind him, a table tennis table takes up half the room.
The idea for Ember came after Glennie endured a 24-hour journey from Namibia to South Africa in a diesel-powered bus in 2018. “He did a quick calculation to figure out how much you’d have saved if the bus had been electric,” explains Bradbury. “The vision then was: can you build a business model around emission-free bus travel?”
The pair secured a £490,000 loan from Triodos Bank under a UK government Covid loan support scheme, which helped acquire the first two coaches. A year later, Ember borrowed again from Triodos to part-fund expansion of the fleet to 24 coaches, and to set up a technology platform called EmberOS that provides real time data on the fleet while responding to passenger demand.
In 2022, Ember bagged external investors including Pale Blue Dot, a Swedish venture capital firm, Gareth Williams, co-founder of travel search firm Skyscanner, Monzo founder Tom Blomfield, and Steven Meersman, co-founder of Zenobē, an electric vehicle battery storage business. Last year others followed, including Inven, a Czech venture capital fund.
Ember’s mission fits with the Scottish government’s aim to decarbonise transport as set out in its National Transport Strategy, launched the same year as Ember. Since then, Holyrood has funded the acquisition of 800 zero emission buses, mostly through over £100m in subsidies to operators under the so-called Scottish Zero Emission Bus Challenge Fund (ScotZEB), one of the most ambitious such schemes in Europe.
Ember’s trajectory so far owes much to ScotZEB, whose subsidies have partially funded 136 of the 138 coaches the company will have in its fleet by next year, up from 78 currently.
The source of those vehicles, Chinese manufacturer Yutong, has raised questions about how the design of Scotland’s green transport subsidies can be reconciled with a perceived need to sustain domestic bus manufacturing. That was thrown into sharp relief in June when Canadian-owned Scottish bus manufacturer Alexander Dennis (ADL) said it might close its factory in Falkirk with the loss of 400 jobs.
In a second funding round last year, known as ScotZEB2, a consortium led by Zenobē was awarded funds for the purchase of about 250 vehicles and the installation of supporting infrastructure. By far the majority of buses ordered under the scheme (171) went to Yutong, with ADL a distant second (44).
Critics of the scheme, including Laurie Macfarlane of think-tank Future Economy Scotland, argue that its evaluation criteria were weighted in favour of financial criteria, benefiting overseas manufacturers and resulting in jobs “offshored abroad”.
ADL has itself criticised Scottish government policy, warning a year ago of “an uneven playing field” for domestic manufacturers. It said this was partly due to subsidy criteria that require adherence to advanced “Fair Work First” standards of employee remuneration, welfare and safety, while overseas bus manufacturers face no such requirement.
Transport Scotland counters that ADL has secured more orders for zero emission buses than any other manufacturer through ScotZEB and predecessor schemes. “It is for bus operators to select their preferred manufacturer,” a spokesman says. This month, a further £40m was made available under ScotZEB2, possibly offering some hope for the survival of ADL’s Falkirk factory.
What is undisputed is how well Yutong is working for Ember – and not just on price. Bradbury explains that the Chinese company, which traces its origins to a bus repair factory founded in Zhengzhou in 1963, is happy to tweak design features on request. “We are spending time with their engineers in China giving real time feedback and they’re able to make changes quickly,” he says.
One result is that Yutong recently swapped side mirrors for aerodynamically efficient camera mirrors.
MeanwhiIe, improvements in battery technology by CATL, the Chinese company that supplies Yutong’s batteries, mean that a battery can be charged in an hour compared with two and a half hours previously.
EmberOS is also a competitive advantage. As Tesla and Uber have shown, green mobility is about running an efficient technology platform, not merely having the shiniest wheels. As Bradbury puts it: “A bit like what Uber did for taxis, we are trying to do for buses.”
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.