The Yutong TCe12 is, arguably, one of the most important UK coaches of the last five decades or maybe longer. Since the first diesel engine went into a coach, the market has seen a lot of very important evolution; stronger and safer bodywork, more powerful engines, and computer-controlled drivelines. We’ve seen huge advances in computer-aided […]
There’s a tendency in the coach and bus business to assume that, to grow, you need to be next door to a major conurbation. Or maybe that’s just me, projecting. Pulhams Coaches certainly shows that a rural location need not hamper growth. Indeed, the villages sprinkled like gold dust over the unutterably gorgeous Cotswolds countryside […]
Road testing Sprinter-based conversions is always a slightly depressing exercise for the Bus and Coach Buyer team. There’s a reason that it’s considered the best base vehicle on the market and, arguably, in its new guise with a raft of new electronic tricks, now even better. The reason is that Mercedes-Benz has a pretty good […]
It’s three months since the London Mayor’s ULEZ scheme kicked into action in the former Congestion Charging zone, so we asked whether coach operators are seeing a traffic dividend. On the face of it, extending the car charge to include weekends should have produced a dip in congestion as car drivers reconsider their transport choice, […]
When, a few years back, Mercedes-Benz announced the end of the Vario manufacturers of midicoaches were thrown into a bit of a turmoil as to how to replace it. Most coachbuilders opted for various versions of the Mercedes-Benz Atego front-engined light truck chassis. This was the route chosen by manufacturers like Ferqui (Connaught); Indcar (Moseley […]
Moseley Distributors does more than just supply vehicles, it can also modify them to meet customer requirements, and it has done this recently with a pair of 12.2m VDL Futura FHD, which it converted to meet DDI 1 and 3 standards. The first coach has gone to Bay Travel of Cowdenbeath and it was so […]
When EVM launched its Sprinter-based Low Floor in 2013, it causes a ripple of interest in the bus market, but only a ripple. The thinking was clear; if you’re going to engineer a vehicle for bus work, make sure it’s durable, and with EVM’s long experience of Sprinter, that was a given. The engineering work, […]
A growing number of operators whose businesses are built on full-sized coaches are buying minicoaches for their fleet, evidenced by new sales in this sector growing while coach sales are shrinking. The king of the road for minicoaches has, for some time, been Mercedes-Benz’ nimble Sprinter, mostly as van conversions, to create upwards of 16 […]