Who builds buses and coaches in Europe

Buses and coaches on European roads are built by groups that also make trucks, namely Daimler Truck, TRATON, Volvo Group and Iveco Group, by bus makers such as Solaris, Irizar, VDL, Alexander Dennis, Wrightbus and CaetanoBus, and by manufacturers in Türkiye: Otokar, Temsa, Karsan, Anadolu Isuzu and BMC. The plants these makers name are in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic, Poland, Belgium, Sweden, North Macedonia, Portugal, the United Kingdom and Türkiye. Since 2023 the map has shifted: Volvo decided to stop building complete buses in Europe, VDL Groep took over parts of the failed Van Hool, and Daimler Buses contracted Otokar to build one of its city buses.

Status as of 27 October 2026. Read that day: the makers’ plant pages, press releases and investor documents listed under Sources, the latest of them Ebusco’s business update of 9 October 2026.

The groups behind the badges

Daimler Truck runs its bus business as the Daimler Buses segment, which is responsible for the bus, coach and service brands Mercedes-Benz, Setra, OMNIplus and BusStore. Its European company was founded on 23 February 1995 as EvoBus GmbH, merging the bus division of Daimler-Benz AG with that of Karl Kässbohrer Fahrzeugwerke GmbH, whose bus brand was Setra; it was renamed Daimler Buses GmbH in 2023 and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Daimler Truck. The segment sold 26,600 units in 2024, against 26,200 in 2023. Its city buses include the Mercedes-Benz Citaro, in series production as the battery-electric eCitaro since 2018.

TRATON GROUP holds four brands, Scania, MAN, International and Volkswagen Truck & Bus, and its range covers trucks, buses and light-duty commercial vehicles. MAN builds buses and coaches under the MAN and NEOPLAN names, among them the MAN Lion’s City; Scania’s own page offers buses for urban and travel operations and a new generation of its Touring coach.

Volvo Group builds buses and coaches as Volvo Buses, which had sales in 85 countries according to its release of March 2023, the month it announced a new business model for Europe.

Iveco Group builds buses as IVECO BUS, whose range runs from minibuses and city buses to intercity, school and tourism coaches; its electric models include the IVECO E-WAY and the HEULIEZ GX ELEC. By its account of May 2025, IVECO BUS employs over 5,500 people in seven plants: Annonay and Rorthais in France, Vysoké Mýto in the Czech Republic, Brescia and Foggia in Italy, Sete Lagoas in Brazil and Córdoba in Argentina. Iveco Group’s ownership is covered in Who builds trucks in Europe.

CAF, the Spanish rolling-stock and transport-systems group, includes Solaris Bus & Coach, which has operated since 1996 and builds low-floor city and intercity buses and trolleybuses. Solaris says all its buses are manufactured in factories in Poland; with its subsidiaries it employs 4,000 people. In 2025 it delivered 1,631 vehicles, 86% of them low- and zero-emission models, and reported revenue of €1.183 billion.

Irizar, founded in 1889 and a cooperative since 1963, has its head office and Creatio R&D centre at Ormaiztegi in Gipuzkoa. It says its group of seven brands produces in 11 plants in Spain, Morocco, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa and is made up of more than 3,900 people; its production-plants page also speaks of plants for buses and coaches “in six countries”. Its coaches include the Irizar i6S.

VDL Groep, a Dutch family company headquartered in the Eindhoven region with over 14,000 employees in 20 countries, builds buses and coaches as VDL Bus Group, which brings together VDL Bus & Coach and VDL Van Hool. Its products include the VDL Citea city bus and the Futura 3 coach, presented at Busworld in Brussels on 2 October 2025.

In the United Kingdom, Alexander Dennis, a subsidiary of NFI Group Inc., builds buses under its own name and coaches under the Plaxton brand. Wrightbus is a division of Bamford Bus Company Holdings Limited; for 2024 its group reported over 2,300 employees and manufacturing units in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, and in Malaysia.

In Portugal, CaetanoBus, part of Toyota Caetano Portugal and Mitsui & Co, describes itself as a manufacturer of buses and chassis; it also builds the COBUS airport bus, and its zero-emission buses have been co-branded with Toyota since July 2021.

In Türkiye, Otokar, Temsa, Karsan, Anadolu Isuzu and BMC build buses beside the plants of Mercedes-Benz Türk and MAN Türkiye. Otokar, founded in 1963, is 47% owned by Koç Holding and 25% by Ünver Holding. Temsa operates under the partnership of Sabancı Holding and PPF Group. Anadolu Isuzu is a joint venture of AG Anadolu Grubu Holding, Isuzu Motors and Itochu Corporation and has been listed on Borsa İstanbul since 1997. Karsan builds its own Jest, Atak and ATA models, among them the electric e-JEST, and has built Megane Sedan cars for Renault since 2022. BMC, founded in 1964, builds buses beside trucks and military vehicles.

Where the buses are physically built

Daimler Buses’ two German plants have set roles: Mannheim is its competence centre for battery-electric city buses, and Neu-Ulm is the competence centre for coaches of all drive types and the only plant that builds Setra coaches. Its other plants are at Ligny-en-Barrois in France, Samano in Spain and Hoşdere in Türkiye; Daimler Truck calls Hoşdere, opened in 1995 and covering 415,000 square metres, the largest bus production site of Daimler Buses globally. The chief executive of Daimler Buses said in February 2025 that, with Mannheim and Neu-Ulm, the company is “the only manufacturer of buses over 8 tons producing in Germany”.

MAN builds city buses and bus chassis at Starachowice in Poland, including the new-generation Lion’s City and Lion’s City E. At Ankara, MAN Türkiye, which in 1966 became MAN’s first production site outside Germany, builds MAN and NEOPLAN city, coach and intercity buses on 317,000 square metres; MAN calls the plant its largest bus production centre, and its bus development, from city buses to NEOPLAN coaches, is based there. A third MAN bus plant is at Olifantsfontein in South Africa.

IVECO BUS’s Vysoké Mýto plant in the Czech Republic, which has built buses since 1895, produced its 150,000th bus in March 2022. It then had more than 3,800 employees, had produced more than 4,000 vehicles a year since 2017, and had built more than 50,000 Crossway intercity buses since that model went into production in 2006. Annonay in France, founded in 1925, has more than 1,200 employees and 118,000 square metres of covered space; it builds the E-WAY and GX ELEC city buses and their fuel-cell versions.

Volvo Group lists Borås and Uddevalla in Sweden as its bus plants in Europe. Solaris carries out final assembly at Bolechowo near Poznań and, since June 2026, also in a new hall at Środa Wielkopolska, where it has welded the steel frames for its buses and trolleybuses since 1998. VDL opened a new factory at Roeselare in Belgium in early 2023, which it names together with Valkenswaard as its centre for e-mobility.

In Türkiye, Otokar’s factory at Sakarya covers 552,000 square metres and has a single-shift capacity of 6,000 buses and minibuses a year besides trucks and military vehicles; its presentation for the first half of 2026 gives the company a total of 4,083 employees. Temsa builds at a 510,000-square-metre site in Adana with a single-shift capacity of 2,000 buses, 2,000 midibuses and 6,000 light trucks a year. Karsan’s Hasanağa factory in Bursa lists capacities of 55,000 Renault Megane cars and 7,290 Jest, Atak and ATA vehicles a year in three shifts. Anadolu Isuzu gives an annual production of 19,000 commercial vehicles (trucks, vans, midibuses and buses) at Şekerpınar, Çayırova, and BMC’s main factory is at Pınarbaşı in İzmir.

In the United Kingdom, Wrightbus manufactures at Ballymena. Alexander Dennis says it now produces bus chassis at Larbert in Scotland, and it still operates at Eastfield in Scarborough, where Plaxton concentrated its Scarborough production in 1988.

The map is moving

In March 2023 Volvo Buses decided to close its bodybuilding factory in Wrocław, Poland, during the first quarter of 2024, and to focus its European production on chassis, offering complete city and intercity buses and coaches in Europe together with external bodybuilders. Its president said the European business “has been loss-making for years”. Volvo Buses said the decision would affect about 1,600 positions, around 1,500 of them in Wrocław, and under a letter of intent the premises were to be divested to Vargas Holding.

After Van Hool failed, VDL Groep announced on 11 June 2024 that it had acquired parts of it: it would take over all intellectual property, design rights, software, product names, tools and machinery, as well as Van Hool’s bus factory in North Macedonia, where about 1,350 people worked, and about 250 Van Hool employees were being recruited for the Van Hool facility at Koningshooikt in Belgium. VDL said then that it would not integrate the acquired activities into its bus and coach operations “for the time being”; at Busworld in October 2025 it presented the integration of VDL Bus & Coach and VDL Van Hool as VDL Bus Group.

Daimler Buses has turned to contract manufacturing. Under an agreement signed on 11 September 2025, Otokar is to build the conventionally powered Mercedes-Benz Conecto for Daimler Buses at its Sakarya plant from September 2026; until the agreement, the Conecto had been built only at Hoşdere. Daimler Buses gave strong demand for Mercedes-Benz and Setra buses as the reason. Otokar’s investor presentation for the first half of 2026 still described the collaboration as upcoming; Otokar has also had a production agreement with IVECO BUS since 2020. Daimler Buses said in February 2025 that it would invest around €150 million in Mannheim and Neu-Ulm by the end of the decade.

Solaris opened its new final-assembly hall at Środa Wielkopolska on 23 June 2026: over 7,000 square metres for battery-electric buses from 9 to 15 metres long, adding about 500 vehicles a year to its capacity, towards annual output and sales of around 2,000 vehicles. It has secured more than 47 hectares in the same municipality for a further, larger plant that is to include intercity buses, with operational readiness targeted for 2029.

In 2024 IVECO BUS added the electric E-WAY and HEULIEZ GX ELEC, until then built only at Rorthais, to its Annonay lines, which were also to take the fuel-cell E-WAY H2, and introduced a unit there that assembles batteries; the first GX ELEC and E-WAY came off those lines in 2024 and the first E-WAY H2 in 2025. In October 2024 it also cited an investment plan of €600 million “in the coming years”, most of it for a new zero-emission platform for city and intercity buses in Europe.

Alexander Dennis announced in June 2025 that it planned to cease bus manufacturing at Falkirk and Larbert in Scotland, then reversed the plan. It has since adapted Larbert to chassis manufacturing, and on 6 October 2026 its president and managing director said it was producing bus chassis there and had “deliberately retained the ability to return to full bus body manufacturing if future demand supports it”.

Ebusco, the Dutch maker of electric buses based in Deurne, delivered 19 buses in the first nine months of 2026. On 9 October 2026 it said it required significant additional short-term funding for its operating expenses, and that without funding in the coming weeks there would be “material uncertainty about Ebusco’s ability to continue as a going concern”.

Makers from outside Europe sell into it as well. Yutong says its new energy buses have been in service in Europe, in the Nordic countries, the UK, France and the Netherlands among others, since it first entered the European market in 2004; it delivered 49,518 vehicles worldwide in 2025, including 100 battery-electric buses in Greece. BYD announced in October 2016 a bus assembly plant at Komárom in Hungary, to start production in the first quarter of 2017.

Chassis, bodies and parts made in-house

Volvo Buses builds chassis in Sweden; under the business model it announced in March 2023 it was to offer complete buses and coaches in Europe in partnership with selected external bodybuilders. MAN’s Starachowice plant builds bus chassis as well as complete city buses, and MAN’s engines and batteries come from Nuremberg. Alexander Dennis now makes bus chassis at Larbert, CaetanoBus builds chassis as well as buses, and IVECO BUS’s Annonay plant makes chassis for another of the group’s plants beside its complete buses. Scania’s buses-and-coaches page names a Scania Irizar i6S Efficient PHEV coach.

Daimler Buses makes intercity and coach seats for both its brands at Neu-Ulm, which also houses the paint competence centre for its whole production network; for the Conecto that Otokar is to build at Sakarya, Daimler Buses is to supply all major vehicle components and specific production equipment. Temsa develops and assembles its own battery packs at Adana, and Karsan’s HOSAB-2 factory in Bursa makes the bodies for its Jest, Atak and ATA buses.

How these buses are driven is set out in City bus propulsion and Electric buses explained, the classes used for city buses, intercity buses and coaches in Bus classes explained, and the zero-emission targets that apply to makers of new city buses in EU CO2 standards for trucks and buses.