The first delivery of Scania’s new Chinese-built A30 arrived in Australia this month, marking the start of a new era for the company’s dip into the school bus sector.
The Pulitano Group is the first operator in Australia to put the A30s into service through its Bus Queensland operation south-west of Brisbane.
The Group has bought 26 vehicles, 25 of which were ready for handover at Scania’s Pinkenba branch in Brisbane on Friday, June 4.
Senior Scania executives flew in from Melbourne to handover the consignment worth more than $8million.
Trevor O’Brien, Scania Australia’s Bus and Coach National Manager, says it was like witnessing the “birth of a baby”.
“This is the end of a three-year project that came from finding Higer in China as a body-builder we wanted to work with,” he says.
The A30s were built from the chassis up by Chinese bus manufacturing giant Higer to Scania’s specifications.
Arriving in Australia ready-built, and ready to work, the A30s offer customers a vastly reduced tender-to-delivery cycle to meet the needs of its customers.
“With a lot of help from Filip Pulitano and his commitment to kick the project off, that’s how we got these first 25 vehicles here today,” O’Brien adds.
The addition of the A30s takes the Pulitano Group’s fleet to a little more than 400 buses, with some being used to replace older vehicles.
Filip Pulitano, Bus Queensland’s Managing Director, says there was a high degree of risk with the project.
“There is always an element of risk because you don’t know what you are getting,” he says.
“Until the day they arrive you have to make the commitment at the conceptual stages, and hope the result is what you believe it to be.”
O’Brien says Scania Australia has a lot of commitment to live up to.
“We have delivered this baby now and we still have a lot of obligations to Filip to make sure we look after the A30s – it’s not over at delivery,” he says.
It’s something Scania says it won’t back away from.
“We have never sold a whole product from top to bottom as a bus,” O’Brien says.
That makes Scania Australia the ‘one-stop-shop’ for any warranty claims or servicing, an aspect it believes will entice other operators to look at the A30s.
O’Brien says Scania has not made a dent on the school bus market until now.
“It’s a three-legged chair, we have three essential products in our line-up and we weren’t selling into one section of it – school buses – this is the tool we found to do that,” he says.
O’Brien is also aware that other school bus suppliers will be watching the Bus Queensland purchase closely.
“We want some of their market share, so yes they are probably watching,” he says.
The first order of 25 is a mix of Euro 4 and Euro 5 emission vehicles.
Each bus is fitted with a push-button six-speed fully automatic ZF gearbox with retarder for smooth stop-start driving.
All vehicles are 59-seaters.
Pulitano says the delivery will benefit the public, with the newer buses servicing school runs in Brisbane’s fast-growing south-western suburbs.
“We will be looking for more buses in the near future to provide for this growth,” he says.
O’Brien is confident that the A30s will be ‘win-win’ all round and is keen to showcase the vehicle to other operators.
That opportunity is just around the corner, as Bus Queensland will have an A30 on display at the BusVic Maintenance Conference and Bus Expo at Moonee Valley racecourse on June 28-29.