While I really can't get that excited over a Citaro, especially ones as hunchbacked as this, the technology deserves to succeed, especially with London choking under fumes. At a mind-blowing price of £750,000 per bus, it will have to! I took a ride on one today and was quite impressed by its quietness and turn of speed (when the traffic allowed). As with both the Citaro and articulated Citaro G, what the vehicles lack in personality and looks is made up for by the performance.

The three buses are allocated to First London's Hackney (H) garage on an additional schedule to the normal 25s, and run on Mondays to Fridays only between Oxford Circus and Stratford. They are also the first vehicles to bear the most untidy new fleetwide numbering system, as ESQ 64993 (LK53 MBV, above) shows as it arrives at Oxford Circus on FC2, the second of the intended three workings. The third will appear as soon as the service has settled down - already one of the new buses has been put out of action temporarily when it was hit from behind by a Routemaster (as if in protest?). Guess which came off completely unscathed. Still, it will reassure those who worry about the safety of hydrogen that the bus did not go up in a mushroom cloud.

Londoners do like to blame the bus for all of the capital's pollution worries, as if the millions of cars were exempt. But all that's pouring out of the chimney stack on ESQ 64993 (LK53 MBV, below) as it leaves Stratford out of service is a big cloud of steam! They even say you can drink what comes out of these buses!