From Cars to Buses: Hybrid Company Grows in Loveland

KUSA – Lightning Hybrids, in Loveland, pivoted from designing a hybrid car to focusing on hybrid technology for buses and trucks.

“When you think about delivery trucks, and you think about transit buses. These guys are stopping sometimes every 100 yards,” said Tim Reeser, who helped found the company.

“What our system does, at a high level, is recover the energy of the braking event, and use it again the next time you accelerate,” Reeser said. “If you think about the little toy cars, when you used to pull them back, and the spring would wind up, wind up, and you let them go and they go back forward again, we’re the same idea.”

Back in 2009, 9NEWS interviewed the company as they premiered a sleek hybrid at the Denver Auto Show.
But designing and building a hybrid car turned out to be too expensive.

“We needed to pivot the business to something we could get off the ground quicker, with less capital, so we moved our technology into the truck and bus space,” Reeser said.

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