The domestically developed road-straddling bus project called Transit Elevated Bus (TEB) is facing media claims that its developer is seeking to extract new funds from investors.
On Thursday, which was during the Mid-Autumn Festival holidays in China, the vehicle builder TEB Technology Development Co posted a statement on its website about the current status of the TEB project.
It said it had completed land acquisition in Zhoukou, Central China's Henan Province, to build a factory that is set to start operation this year.
However, citing unidentified authorities at Zhoukou port, the Guangzhou-based newspaper Nanfang Metropolis Daily reported on Tuesday that the port had not talked with TEB about the factory building.
Reporters from the Xinhua News Agency found that the location where TEB's research and development center had supposedly been established at the Zhoukou port was just an empty lot as of August 4.
It seems this is not the first time that the public bus project has been the subject of confusing reports.
On August 5, authorities from Qinhuangdao, North China's Hebei Province, said that TEB vehicles are only for tourism rather than for mass transport.
The issue of the statement on Thursday is just likely to be another attempt to attract more money from investors, said the Nanfang report.
TEB said in the statement that it is looking for equity investment as well as strategic investors.
The elevated superbus project has been controversial since it kicked off its first road test in Qinhuangdao in early August.
The Beijing News reported on August 6 that the project is actually run by a Beijing-based online peer-to-peer lending platform Huaying Kailai and hundreds of branches of the platform across the country are raising money in the name of local government support for TEB-related Public-Private Partnership projects.
The vehicle maker TEB has signed cooperation agreements with five cities so far such as Qinhuangdao, North China's Tianjin, Shenyang, capital of Northeast China's Liaoning Province, said media reports.
