First Chinese Ankai Double Decker Bus Serves in London
28 April 2012
www.chinabuses.org: The first Chinese double-decker to operate in the UK are now in service on sightseeing services with Big Bus Tours in London. There are 20, manufactured by Ankai, and they are built to two specifications – full or partial open-top. All are 81-seaters with Cummins engines, Voith gearboxes and ZF axles. Their arrival represents the culmination of a two-year collaboration between Big Bus Tours and Ankai.
Ankai double-deckers in London
Big Bus Tours' group engineering director Gerry Price says: “We pushed the Ankai team to deliver the best vehicle they could to meet the intensely busy service requirements of the London operation, whilst raising the bar in terms of quality of fit and finish needed to impress even our most discerning customers. All of this went on within the very prescriptive realms of the IVA process; and although the process itself could not be classed as plain sailing, the products of that process, and even more importantly the efforts of the whole London engineering team in collaboration with the Ankai team, have resulted in an extremely impressive vehicle.”
Big Bus Tours and Ankai have had a relationship for more than four years, with Ankai first supplying vehicles to Big Bus Tours in Dubai in 2007. Since then they have developed buses to meet the requirements of a number of other markets and Big Bus Tours has Ankai buses in operation in Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Las Vegas, San Francisco and Philadelphia.
Big Bus Tours currently operates over 300 sightseeing buses worldwide, of which 74 have been manufactured by Ankai.
Source : www.bigbustours.com
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