THE first 10 diesel-electric hybrid buses in a fleet of 50 will be on the road from December, as part of the national effort to make the public bus fleet here more environmentally friendly.

They will be run by operators SBS Transit and SMRT, said the Land Transport Authority (LTA) when announcing the move on Monday. Among the first routes to get the buses is service 272 , a feeder service operated by SBS Transit in the Bukit Merah area.

In a hybrid, when brakes are applied, the electric motor acts as a generator to recover kinetic energy, which is stored in the batteries as electricity.