Wrightbus
 |
|
| Private | |
| Industry | Automotive |
| Founded | 1946 |
| Headquarters | Ballymena, Northern Ireland |
| Products | Bus and coach manufacturer |
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Number of employees
|
1,800 (2014) |
| Website | www.wrightbus.com |
Wrightbus is a Northern Irish coachbuilder and pioneer of the low-floor bus based in Northern Ireland; it was established in 1946 by Robert Wright and currently run by his son William Wright.
Wrightbus was founded in 1946 as Robert Wright & Son Coachbuilders. In its early years it rebodied lorries. In 1978, the company released its first aluminium-structured bus bodywork.
Wright's breakthrough into the mainstream bus bodybuilding sector came in the early 1990s. The Handybus was a midibus body offered on a variety of chassis but was most successful on the emerging Dennis Dart attracting reasonably sized orders from a variety of operators including London Buses, Go Ahead Northern, Ulsterbus and Citybus (Belfast). This was followed by a move into the full size single deck market with the Endeavour which was fitted to Dennis Javelin, Leyland Tiger and Scania K93 chassis, and enabled Wright to develop its highly successful Endurance body which competed with the Alexander Strider and Northern Counties Paladin for orders on Volvo B10B and Scania N113CRB chassis.
Other Wright products introduced in this period included two Mercedes-Benz-based products, the O405 based Cityranger and the OH1416 based Urbanranger. This was launched around the time bus operators in the UK began switching to low floor chassis. As a consequence the Urbanranger only attracted a handful of orders. However Wright had become well established in the bus bodybuilding sector by then and was more than able to exploit the opportunities the low-floor revolution would offer it from mid-1990s onwards.
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Wikipedia