China’s Vision for a Straddling Bus Dissolves in Scandal and Arrests<br />“Everything we do is approved by related departments in the government,<br />and if we are an illegal company with financial issues, why are the local governments still interested in us?”<br />In the fall, as public scrutiny increased, the test track and the huge, 72-foot-long, 16-foot-high prototype fell into disuse.<br />“Cars under the belly of the big vehicle would have no way to change direction,<br />and even changing lanes would be dangerous,” The Beijing News said last year.<br />We are not a briefcase company for illegal fund-raising,” Zhang Wei, the director of development<br />and planning for TEB Tech, the Huaying Kailai subsidiary that developed the bus, told the reporter.<br />A Chinese inventor’s plan to develop such a vehicle, called a “traffic-straddling bus,” has been effectively<br />killed after 32 people from an investment company that backed the project were arrested.<br />But critics raised many questions, including the expense of installing tracks<br />and stations, whether tall trucks would get stuck underneath and about the risk to smaller vehicles and pedestrians.
