Designworks Fashions a Renaissance in Luxury Bus Business
Load a team of industrial designers onto a bus for a drive from Ventura County to the wine country north of Santa Barbara and several things might happen. They might enjoy gazing at the coastline. They might have a nice meal and a drink.
Or they might try to redesign the bus.
The latter was the purpose of a 1994 road trip taken by employees of Designworks/USA, a BMW-owned company in Newbury Park.
Transportation was provided courtesy of Motor Coach Industries Inc., an Illinois-based bus manufacturer that hired Designworks to create a sleek exterior and interior design for a new tour bus.
“All of the designers were taking apart the whole bus,” said Klaus Tritschler, a lead designer for Designworks. “Everybody created a sheet with suggestions and input.”
Three years later, those Designworks suggestions and subsequent drawings, sketches and models have resulted in the new Renaissance luxury motor coach, expected to be available to customers by the end of this month.
The 45-foot bus, which will be used primarily by tour companies, includes curved stairs for boarding and exiting, extra-large windows and restrooms, lower seats in the front of the bus that are similar to theater seats, a videocassette system and a 38-speaker stereo and public address system.
“We had to follow three criteria,” Tritschler said. “The passengers’ criteria, the drivers’ desires and the needs and desires of the operator, who wants the coach cheap but expensive-looking and easy to maintain, with curb appeal on the outside and appeal on the inside.”
Opinion surveys, he said, determined that passengers want a comfortable interior and drivers want ergonomically designed seats, good visibility and other features the average car driver would want.
Officials of Motor Coach Industries plan to sell the buses, which seat about 55 passengers, for $350,000 to $370,000 each. Company officials expect to manufacture 200 to 300 Renaissance buses this year.
Motor Coach Industries, owned by Consorcio G Grupo Dina SA de CV of Mexico, is the leading bus maker for the Greyhound line, which has ordered a Renaissance bus scheduled for production this year. The company annually produces about 1,200 buses.
Chuck Pelly, chief executive of Designworks, said that the project with Motor Coach Industries wasn’t a make-or-break deal for his company, but that long-term benefits could be significant.
“It’s not the biggest deal, the biggest deal is our cars, but as an outside transportation product, this is very big,” Pelly said. “We’re excited about the possibilities of custom coaches for people, and coaches [for corporations]; there’s been an interest in that.”
Outside transportation projects account for about 25% of Designworks’ business, Pelly said, with another 35% for BMW cars. The remainder is product design for Compaq Computer Corp., Siemens and other companies.
The company’s resume includes trains and motor homes, but Designworks had not worked on a bus until the Renaissance project.
“The U.S. has not been big in new coaches--the U.S. is really behind Europe,” Pelly said. “It’s the great passenger car and airplane that dominate American travel, and trains and buses have been much more secondary.”
But Peter Pantuso, president and chief executive of the Washington, D.C.-based American Bus Assn., said interest in buses is on the rise. And according to the industry publication National Bus Trader, 2,650 buses were manufactured and sold in North America in 1996, a 25% increase from 1995.
“The industry is doing very well,” Pantuso said. “There’s a constant and steady growth on the charter and tour side of the business and the route side of the business is very, very strong.”
Pantuso was impressed with the design of the Renaissance bus.
“It’s a beautiful piece of equipment, a very exciting new design in the industry,” he said. “It’s very stylish, certainly not the equipment people may have ridden on years ago.”
Bryan Couch, Motor Coach Industries’ program manager on the Renaissance project, is equally pleased with the design.
“MCI is noted for very durable, hard-working coaches, but we’ve always lacked curb appeal,” Couch said. “We decided to use an outside design source to do this. We searched North America and a couple of places in Europe for a design house to meet our needs. The thing that clinched [Designworks] for us was they understood the science of vehicle styling--to have the bus look long, tall and sexy.”
Couch said the Designworks product was well-suited to the passengers who are expected to ride the Renaissance.
“This coach is intended for runs to gambling casinos, eight- or 10-day trips, tours for seniors,” he said. “There are baby boomers that now want to travel and do not want to drive a car, so they have higher demands of the vehicle they travel in.”
