Skip to main content

Bombardier high speed train wins design awards in USA and Germany

Bombardier Transportation has won the iF Product Design Award as well as the Good Design Award for its ground-breaking very high speed (VHS) train currently being developed for leading railway markets in Europe, Asia and North America.
March 13, 2012 Read time: 2 mins

513 Bombardier Transportation has won the iF Product Design Award as well as the Good Design Award for its ground-breaking very high speed (VHS) train currently being developed for leading railway markets in Europe, Asia and North America. The Zefiro train platform combines the highest capacity in the industry with pioneering levels of passenger comfort and employs leading-edge technologies and advanced aerodynamics to reduce energy consumption. The company says the technology exists to meet virtually any high speed requirement anywhere in the world.

The Zefiro high speed train platform can accommodate speed performance from 250-380 km/h (155-235 mph) and is highly flexible. Trains can significantly reduce travelling times between major cities and boost interregional economic growth.

The iF Product Design Award from Germany recognises design quality, finish, choice of materials, degree of innovation, environmental impact, functionality, safety as well as brand value.
This is also the third time in five years that Bombardier has won the Good Design Award for its train design. The award is conferred annually by the Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design together with the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.

"These prestigious awards are testament to the Zefiro VHS train's innovative approach to very high speed travel," said Michael Sohn, team leader industrial design, Zefiro project, Bombardier Transportation.

The unique aerodynamic design of the Zefiro train family leads to superior cross wind stability, aerodynamic drag and pressure pulses. Bombardier Transportation is the first company in Europe to develop and apply an aluminum carbody for driving cars as well as trailer cars in the high speed segment, resulting in reduced weight and lower track wear as well as full compliance with stringent safety requirements. Other innovative developments include the Bombardier EBI Drive 50 driver assistance system and the company’s thermo efficient climatisation system. The company claims that these and other energy saving measures mean that Zefiro trains boast the lowest energy consumption per seat of any VHS train.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Why keeping count is so important for traffic management
    November 21, 2023
    Traffic engineers need to have multiple solutions in their toolbox to complete the most accurate and safe data collection programmes possible, explains Wes Guckert of The Traffic Group
  • Developments in software visualisation packages
    February 3, 2012
    Adrian Greeman looks at developments in software visualisation packages. The capacity to make visualisations has been growing in importance over the last decade, and is now a well-accepted part of consultations and client presentations. But making high-quality images of projects is still a major undertaking and larger consultancies employ specialist departments to do so. Costs are coming down but it can still take a while, and some high-capacity hardware, to produce realistic renderings from drawings and 3D
  • Scaling up road safety analysis with Aimsun cloud simulation
    May 10, 2023
    Synthetic generation, execution, and analysis of thousands of road safety scenarios is exponentially more efficient and wider ranging than any methodology based on field data. Marcel Sala & Jordi Casas of Aimsun examine the benefits of cloud simulation for safety testing
  • WIM system certification is a complex business
    February 21, 2018
    There are interesting moves afoot to create Germany’s first Weigh-In-Motion enforcement site in Hamburg – but Florian Weiss of Traffic Data Systems warns that WIM certification is a complex business. In the past, Weigh-In-Motion (WIM) was mainly used for statistical (WIM-S) and pre-selection (WIM-P) applications. These abbreviations - as well as WIM-E (enforcement) and WIM-T (tolling) - were created by Traffic Data Systems during Intertraffic 2006 in Amsterdam. This was also the year when we started the