The Dijon Symone bus will revolutionize your motorway travel
The fight against global warming is pushing us to review our modes of travel. The young Dijon company Simon
has understood this well and is currently working on the development of a non-polluting bus intended to reduce the number of vehicles on the motorways and equipped with sockets to recharge electric cars during the journey. You can reserve your place and travel without getting tired. Interview with Romain Coispine, co-founder of Symone.
Loading
France Bleu Bourgogne: Symone is a company very committed to the fight against global warming and pollution. You go even further than carpooling, you explain why or do you comment?
Romain Coispine: We realized that on the highway, there were every day more than 100,000 vehicles, cars, motorcycles that failed long journeys. And so we had to find a solution, but also to stop wasting time behind the wheel. That’s why we invented Simone. In addition, you should know that motorway journeys represent more than 6% of greenhouse gas emissions in France alone. And that is only for light vehicles and utility vehicles.
What is Symone’s principle?
It is a large articulated coach. Concretely, we will book our trip on the Symone mobile application and then you will arrive with your car or your motorbike upstream of the toll. There, there will be Symone waiting for you. We will load your car or motorcycle upstairs and you will then settle down in a comfortable passenger cabin. It’s like piggybacking on the road or like the car train when it existed, but here it’s more flexible and directly on the highway and in complete safety.
But can buses also pollute?
Exactly. But here, it is already a shared mode of travel, so it will save CO2 anyway. And, the big advantage, and not the least, is above all that Symone will be powered by green hydrogen. This will therefore make it possible to decarbonize motorway journeys.
Will this only concern long motorway journeys?
On going mainly offering Symone on long distance lines, more or less from 200 kilometers, Lyon / Paris / Mediterranean. Transversal axes also between the West and the East. Symone will transport 6 to 9 vehicles, so cars or motorcycles, but we can also make Symone available to open up the territories, to offer a solution like the train, with the same advantages of the train, even for medium-sized cities. and on transverse axes.
We are going to talk about the Côte-d’Or. If we leave Dijon to go to Paris, can we possibly consider taking this Symone bus?
It is quite possible, indeed, that we can put Simone from toll to toll to go to Paris from Dijon. We also see that with the “road safety” and “ecological transition” aspects of this Symone, it is of great interest to all institutions and politicians. We had the support of around fifty parliamentarians, so it’s really huge!
You launch a call for funding. How?
In a few weeks, we will launch this call, probably from April or May, for a period of two or three months. In exchange for a participation from €100 and open to all, everyone can participate to enter this great adventure and therefore have shares in the company.
Your objective is to bring these Symone buses into service by what date?
The prototype should be released in early 2024. Our goal is to have it for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, which will be a great launch showcase for people to discover this innovation. The next step will be to industrialize it from 2025 in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté. We then aim to put up to a hundred Symone in circulation in France in 2030, before developing abroad.