More in this in today's Star. Windsor will not only build them, Windsor will showcase them by adding them to their fleet.

Electric mass transit is an idea whose time has come - again - and Windsor is taking a smart gamble by positioning the city as the experimental hub for the technology in North America.
That's my take on Mayor Eddie Francis's news that the city has a joint venture with BYD Motor Inc. to help market, sell and build the company's vehicles. The Chinese company produces the world's only commercial, batterypowered transit bus.


As you learned here first in this column last year, Mayor Eddie Francis has been struggling mightily to cut a deal with BYD to assemble those buses here from CKD [[complete knock-down) kits for the NAFTA region. Volvo did the same thing with passenger cars until 1998 in Halifax.


Transit Windsor has also agreed to buy several BYD buses and put them in regular service as a kind of open demonstration of the company's products.

The transit board and the city corporation will share duties as gracious hosts to out-oftown transit officials who will be visiting Windsor in droves [[they hope) to kick bus tires and see how the BYD babies perform real-world duties.