Powerhouse pothole plugger could end the scourge of crumbling roads

A new pothole-busting machine being used by councils can fill in six times as many holes in an hour than gangs of workmen.

JCB’s new PotholePro has repaired more potholes in its first three months of trials than the average council fills in a year, according to the digger company.

The machine is the passion project of the company's chairman, Lord Bamford, who has said the country has become "fixated" with the issue of patching up its pockmarked roads.

It comes as the UK faces an estimated £10 billion repairs bill to complete all the works needed on the crumbling road network.

Last month, the RAC warned that parts of Britain’s roads now resembled the "surface of the moon" after their state had deteriorated significantly during what has been a particularly cold winter.

Currently, councils use gangs of workmen to fill in potholes as they appear, with works taking up to an hour. Workers can use handtools like jackhammers or a collection of up to three different machines to cut a clean hole and clear out the damaged asphalt, before pouring in new tarmac.

JCB has designed its new £165,000 machine so it can cut, crop and clean a new hole in under eight minutes, allowing workmen to pour the new tarmac immediately. The vehicle also has a top speed of 24mph so it can be driven to where works are needed.

Ben Rawding, a product manager for JCB, said the company had focused on developing a new technology to speed up pothole repair as it felt Britain was reaching a "breaking point" with the state of its roads.

He said: “It is a massive innovation in the industry as the ways to fix potholes have stayed pretty static in the last 20 to 25 years. 

“That’s really why we have focused on the JCB Pothole Pro as a big change. One of the unique elements that make it so different is being able to do the three processes of cutting, cropping and cleaning with one machine.”

Since the Pro, pictured below, was first unveiled in January, the company has been trialling it on roads across the country, seeing it filling over 16,500 potholes over the last few months. Councils on average fill in around 10,000 over a year.

Speaking back in January, Lord Bamford said he had been moved to design the machine after seeing the decline in the state of Britain’s roads.

He said: “Potholes really are the scourge of our nation. Our country is quite rightly fixated on this dreadful problem and as a British manufacturer I am fixated on finding a solution. 

“We simply cannot allow our road network to continue to be blighted by potholes.”

JCB currently has a deal with Stoke-on-Trent council to use the machine and is in talks with a number of other authorities over licensing the machine.

Earlier this year, the Government promised councils an extra £500 million to help tackle the growing pothole problem.

However, the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA), which represents the road repairs industry, now estimates the total cost of the UK’s repairs backlog to be at £10.4 billion.

The body warned that filling in potholes, while necessary, was often a short-term fix and many of the UK’s roads now needed complete resurfacing.

Rick Green, the AIA’s chair, said: “Potholes and pothole repairs are the symptoms of an underfunded network, where hard pressed highway teams continue to have to make tough decisions between short-term fixes and long-term structural improvements – so they can keep all of their networks functioning. 

“Repeatedly filling in potholes is essentially a failure as it does nothing to improve the resilience of the network.”