The People Mover is one of the series of prestige automotive projects that are announced with a lot of fanfare, but then it gets quieter and quieter. Volkswagen’s one-liter car XL1 is one of them, Daimler’s fuel cell B-Class and certainly also the electric transporter Streetscooter of Deutsche Post, which has since been sold. ZF Friedrichshafen boss Wolf-Henning Scheider (60) wanted to drive to the top of the scene with autonomous electric minibuses that can reach speeds of up to 40 kilometers per hour. The model will go into series production from 2019, Scheider announced in 2018, initially together with the Aachen partner Günther Schuh (63, E.Go Mobile), over five to seven years it would be possible to sell one million of the robotic buses.
Today, the people mover is only used in Rotterdam by the transport service provider Transdev under real conditions, in single-digit numbers. ZF sold its shares in the joint venture with E.Go at the end of 2020, and a little later the new E.Go owner ND Group parted ways with the shuttle division. At ZF, things continued on their own with the robotic buses. When Scheider recently enthused that “our entire competence is evident in the new shuttle generation”, it was probably primarily advertising.