Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder.

It's Thursday the 14th of March and I'm in the very good company of John Bouton.

He is commercial director for National Express.

You will, of course, be very familiar with the smart white coaches that are running around the UK.

But there's an awful lot of issues that I'd like to tackle in the next few minutes with you, John, if I may, starting with going electric.

Wow, that's a great place to start, isn't it? Yes. So today we have launched our first trial

electric coach out of Stansted, running between Stanston in London. We think this has got a

great future for our short range services. So we're going to learn an awful lot over the next

month about how that performs in real life.

Do you think it's something that the passenger is going to appreciate?

I mean, I've been a national express customer all my life,

but that's mostly been on grounds of economy rather than the environment.

Do you know, I think the environment is one thing

and making sure that we're heading towards

our net zero target by 2035, that's one thing.

But I sat on that coach at Stansted earlier on this week, and it is a completely different

experience. It is quiet and smooth and luxurious and futuristic. And, you know, our coaches are brilliant already.

They really are.

But this just felt like a move into a slightly different dimension.

So I think our customers are really appreciated.

On that coach experience, and more and more people that I talk to haven't actually been

near a coach for many years.

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