Highly sophisticated production as a quality safeguard
The manufacture of the Citaro is just as pioneering. The bodyshells are assembled in the Bodyshell Centre at the Mannheim bus plant. The Citaro bodies are then primed in the Mannheim plant's cathodic dip priming facility to ensure complete corrosion protection with no gaps. The bodyshells then either move straight to final assembly in Mannheim or are transported to the assembly plants in Ligny-en-Barrois in France or Neu-Ulm to be turned into finished vehicles. Despite an urban bus's tremendous complexity, the error rate has been tending towards zero for a long time now. Nevertheless, before being delivered to the customer, every bus is put through its paces under practical conditions in real traffic on a route measuring around 100 kilometres in length.
Milestone buses supplied to Germany, Austria, Spain and Sweden
All things considered, it is little wonder that the Mercedes-Benz Citaro continues to break one record after the next. The 1000th Citaro left the factory just two years after production started, Citaro no. 10,000 rolled off the assembly line at the end of 2004. In early 2008, Mercedes-Benz delivered its 20,000th Citaro, followed by the 30,000th in summer 2010.