Taking the Long View

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Does the UAE really need another custom-job breaking the sound barrier to get between Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Designer Antonia Terzi says “yes!”

The UAE saw the sort of fuss that used to be reserved for tall buildings and digging up the sea floor to create real estate last month when the Dutch Superbus rolled off the ramp at the end of its KLM flight and into the UITP event.

The Superbus, the 15m-long 250km/h electric vehicle arrived pre-hailed as a high speed, green link between Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Newspapers, TV shows, radio and websites all jumped on its appearance and lapped it up.

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Being able to race – legally – between the twin metropolises on the road at 200kp/h captured something. A fantasy made real and seemingly built to inspire the UAE.

After UITP, the Superbus prototype was placed onto a flat bed truck and transported to Abu Dhabi for a demonstration at Masdar, where PMV meets designer Antonia Terzi.

Superbus is the brainchild of a veritable brain fund of a trio: an entrepreneur, an astronaut and a racing car designer. Centre of attention in April was the third of that triumvirate, designer and test driver Terzi.

The name Superbus sounds like the name of B-movie from the 1970s and it looks like the sort of car that the Thunderbirds tried to rescue in the 1960 but this is not a future relic says Terzi.

“I wanted something that looked really cool. I want people to think that ‘I might not have a Ferrari, but at least I can feel what it’s like to be in one,” she begins. “But it also had to be sustainable.”

Until Terzi climbed on-board the project Superbus was a Frankenstein design: a collection of batteries bolted onto a chassis, unrefined aerodynamics and various extraneous bits of kit to keep it ticking over.

Although Dutch astronaut Wubbo Ockels, once a mission specialist on the Challenger Space Shuttle, could see potential – “it was half the price of alternatives, high-speed train or maglev trains, as well as a much higher profit margin, higher efficiency and less impact on the environment, that it seemed like an absolute winner to me” – he needed someone to bring it all together.

Enter Terzi to end what could have been a slow fall into development hell.

Into the team Terzi’s brought her previous experience at Formula 1 teams BMW Williams and Ferrari, and Superbus progressed and she began to make a chassis that they could hang high-technology onto and gain the aerodynamics to get it to move at the speeds required.

“I lowered the height of the vehicle. At 2m-plus clearance, I couldn’t get the aerodynamics needed,” she explains. “It needs to be low so that it can not only stick on the road but at high speeds it becomes highly manoeuvrable.