Nova Bus

Nova Bus is a bus manufacturing company based in Saint-Eustache, Quebec, Canada. The company is now owned by Volvo Buses.

History

The factory was originally a General Motors' plant for building city transit busses intended for the Canadian market. In 1987 GM divested its entire bus holdings, selling them to Motor Coach Industries (MCI), itself formed from companies formerly owned by Greyhound Lines. The plant was used to produce the Classic model for sales in Canada, while GMC's RTS product was moved to join MCI's own designs at Transportation Manufacturing Corporation in Roswell, New Mexico.

MCI decided to divest itself of is urban rapid transit models in 1993, and Nova Bus was created to take over the Classic and RTS models at the Saint-Eustache and Roswell plants. Nova Bus is thus the spiritual descendant of the original GM lines. The Classic and RTS were later dropped in order to concentrate on the Nova LFS, a low-floor city bus, which was introduced in 1995. The last Classic model was produced in 1997.

The Nova LFS proved to perform poorly compared to competitors in terms of sales, and Nova Bus closed their Roswell and Niskayuna, New York plants in 2002 to concentrate all effort on the Canadian market. The Roswell plant was later taken over by a local consortium, Millennium Transit Services, but this effort went bankrupt in 2008.

Nova Bus now tends to focus on the Canadian market. However the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), with several hundred LFS units in its active bus fleet, remains one of the larger NovaBus operators. On February 2, 2008, Nova Bus announced plans for the construction of a new assembly plant in Plattsburgh, New York, signifying the company's return to the U.S. bus market.

Products

Current

The current powertrain layout mounted to the left is planned to be changed to a center-mounted powertrain with ventilation from the roof on all LFS models starting in 2009. Some demonstrators and test buses already have this layout.

Model	Length	Photo	Introduced	Notes
LFS Transit	40 ft.		1995	Originally designates LFS 40102
LFS HEV	40 ft.		2006	Diesel electric hybrid version of the LFS, using an Allison hybrid drive system
LFS Shuttle	40 ft.		2005
LFS Suburban	40 ft.		2005
LFS Artic	62 ft.		2008	Articulated bus Large orders are anticpated by RTC, who have already called for tenders on an articulated bus order, and STM in Montréal.
LFX	62 ft.		2008	Bus Rapid Transit styling

Past

Model	Length	Photo	Years Produced	Notes
Rapid Transit Series (RTS)	40 ft.	1993-2002	Developed by General Motors Diesel Division Buses (1977-2003), (although no longer produced by NovaBus, a small company named Millennium Transit purchased the rights to build them) RT80-2W
TC40102N	40 ft.	1993-1997	Developed as a redesign of the original GMC New Look) originally produced by GM (1983 - 1987), then MCI (1987-1993)
TC60102N	60 ft.	1993-1997

External links

Commons: Nova Bus – Sammlung von Bildern, Videos und Audiodateien

• Official site
• Nova Bus page at busexplorer.com