Optima Bus.
The company was originally called Chance Coach. It was founded in 1976 in Wichita, Kansas, and made small city buses. Originally specializing mainly in trolley buses, in 2003, the Optima joined the NABI. Production under the old name was moved to Alabama, to the plant of the parent company.
Now the lineup includes low-floor city buses Opus 9,15 and 10,5 m long with bodies of English Wright, including hybrid models; touristic replicas of AH-28, Sunliner streetcars.
New Flyer
This company was founded in Manitoba, Canada, in 1930. John Kowal and formerly called Western Auto and Truck Body Works, Western Flyer Coach). Five of its employees assembled the first bus on a Chevrolet chassis. Ten years later, the first open-top pleasure buses were built. In 1948, the company changed its name to Western Flyer.
In 1954, the company built its first trolleybus – the 700E. After ACF-Brill, Kenworth, Marmon-Herrington, Pullman-Standart, St. Louis Car and TwinCoach left the trolleybus market, “horns” became an important field for the firm.
Since the 1960s, New Flyer focused on the production of city buses. Introduced in 1978, the D901 city bus was the first in the U.S. to introduce a curved shape windshield – for better visibility to the driver.
In 1986 the company was bought out by Jan den Oudsen, co-owner of the family bus company Den Oudsen from the Netherlands, changed the name and added the European technologies. Already in 1988 the first low-floor bus, the D40LF, was presented. And ten years later, a one-time order for 6300 vehicles promoted New Flyer to the first ranks of the manufacturers.
In 2003 a new height was reached – the order for 213 hybrid buses was received, the biggest at that time. In addition, since 2005, New Flyer has produced the largest number of trolleybuses for cities in the U.S. and Canada; Vancouver received 262 low-floor cars and Philadelphia received another 38. At the same time, the interiors of all types are updated, and in 2008 the latest generation Xcelsior appears.
Nova Bus.
This company from Canada was part of the GM empire for many years, assembling the brand’s model buses for the local market. In 1987, MCI took over the Canadian plant, but the company continued to assemble city model Classic till the end of the century.
In 1993, Nova gained independence and developed its own low-floor model LFS, which was a symbiosis of GM’s RTS and Classic models. This was made easier by the fact that a year later Nova Bus incorporated the bus company TMC, acquired from MCI, which had been producing the RTS model.
Subsequently, the new model was improved in units and subjected to external changes in accordance with general trends. Thus, the driveline, originally offset to the left on the horizontal axis, gave way to a classical centerline, and the body panels were made of multi-layer fiberglass (impregnated and baked fiberglass). In the following years, this model was assembled by order of different companies from the U.S. and Canada. For example, in March 2012. The Walt Disney Company announced the purchase of a batch of articulated buses for Disneyland California.
In 2005, Nova was purchased by Prevost, a major Canadian manufacturer, which, in turn, is owned by Volvo. Currently, the Nova Bus program is the only LFS series in three modifications: urban, suburban and articulated for BRT. The city 12.4-meter model with 38 seats is equipped with 280 hp Cummins engine and automatic transmission Allison. Suburban in the same body, but with one door and 49 seats.
TMC
Transportation Manufacturing Corporation was created in 1974 as a subsidiary of MCI, owned by Greyhound. In 1987, it began production of the only city model RTS (Rapid Transit System) purchased from GM. In 1994, TMC was sold to NovaBus, which closed it in 2003.
Millennium Transit Services
Millennium Transit Services was formed in 2003 by buying out the closed NovaBus plant in Roswell, New Mexico, with the help of banks and the state government. There it went on to produce the RTS series of city/suburban vehicles developed by GM, later bought back by MCI. Contract deliveries began in 2005, and at the same time an order was received to convert 25 of these buses into gas-powered buses.