Buses are ubiquitous. They are the most common means of public transportation worldwide, enabling access to the remotest of places. You may be surprised to learn that bus transportation is almost 200 years old. The first bus, named Omnibus, was horse-drawn. It was started in 1826 by Stanislas Baudry in the French city of Nantes and quickly spread to other cities.
Carl Benz, the inventor of the first practical automobile, built the first motorized bus in 1895. The same year, it was put into service to carry up to 8 passengers between the German towns of Siegen, Netphen, and Deuz. When researching the history of bus transportation, it didn’t surprise me when I learned that Mercedes-Benz gave a new meaning to passenger comfort by launching the revolutionary O321H series bus. It was in their heritage.
I grew up in India, where, until recently, most buses were built on a truck chassis. These buses weren’t very comfortable. Our family often took inter-city buses to visit relatives. Whenever we took a bus, one rule was never to sit at the rear of the bus. Trucks used leaf springs to carry heavy loads. In a bus with a much lighter passenger load, these leaf springs made the ride at the rear very bumpy. Only when the Indian bus operators started importing buses from Europe, mainly from Volvo, did Indians get a taste of comfortable (and fast) bus service.
Comfortable bus transportation arrived in the Western world much earlier, specifically in 1954, when Mercedes launched the O321H/HL series buses. This bus’s achievement isn’t limited to providing safe and comfortable public transport. It became an ambassador of the Mercedes brand and the quality of German engineering. Mercedes-Benz was one of the first manufacturers to recognize that the design for carrying heavy loads did not apply to carrying people. There was a need for a new design that could transport people over long distances in a much more comfortable way than they were used to.
The design for the O321H/HL series was borrowed from passenger cars. It includes innovations never thought of in mass transportation, such as an integrated floor assembly, a load-bearing body structure, a subframe front axle suspension with coil springs, and recirculating ball steering with dampers. These innovations improved passengers’ comfort and made driving the bus easier and safer. It gave the buses a much smaller turning radius, critical for navigating mountain passes without backing up to complete hairpin turns, an inherently dangerous maneuver.
During its run from 1954 – 1964, Mercedez-Benz built and exported thousands of buses worldwide. The O321 series became the foundation of bus design. To this day, bus manufacturers use the concepts pioneered in this series. When we comfortably ride a bus today, we may not think about its design, but that comfort is owed to the Mercedes-Benz O321H series.
