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English   From landau to low-frame bus: passenger transportation from 1885 to 1926
22.06.2010 von admin

German version

From landau to low-frame bus: passenger transportation from 1885 to 1926
  • Benz builds his first bus in 1895
  • The bus takes a long time to emancipate itself from the truck
  • First buses with special frames arrive in 1925


Model of the 1 Motor omnibus

Carl Benz in Mannheim had been approaching the commercial vehicle on a completely different route when Gottlieb Daimler passed away in 1900. Benz concentrated on buses and what we would call vans today. “Combination delivery vehicle” was the name given to the first fast Benz van of 1896 in the marketing jargon of the day.

Carl Benz had even built his first bus two years earlier. Since 1884 he had been offering his motorcars in an optional landau version: a landau is a coach which carries a maximum of eight passengers and has either a folding top or a glazed upper section with a solid roof. Mainly hotels used these landaus to collect their guests from the train station or bring them to their trains. The original idea for the first motorized scheduled service came from the city fathers of Netphen and Siegen in the Siegerland region, who proposed linking their two provincial towns by a bus line. They gave Benz an order to build two engine-powered buses.

Based on the landau, Carl Benz designed a carriage-like vehicle with an enclosed passenger compartment (eight seats), but an unprotected bench for the (two) drivers. The five hp one-cylinder engine displacing 2.65 liters was mounted at the rear, drove the rear wheels by chain and accelerated the vehicle to a top speed of 20 km/h.

Benz delivered the first of these two “intercity buses” on March 12, 1895, the second on March 29 of the same year, for a price of 6000 gold marks each. The buses needed an hour and 20 minutes to negotiate the 15 kilometer route Siegen – Netphen – Deutz, with its five stops and 80 meters difference in altitude. But as it quickly turned out, particularly in the wet the graceful solid rubber tires of these vehicles had to fight an uphill battle against the deep ruts produced by heavy horse and cart combinations. Though conversion to wide iron wheels did improve wheel control, it greatly impaired road grip. To top it all, shortcomings in maintenance, the difficulty of procuring spare parts, and inadequate driver training made the new bus line anything but a joy.

The result was that these buyers quickly ceased operation in the following winter and returned the two buses to Carl Benz. But undoubtedly they deserve recognition for having put the first bus line on wheels in Germany. Such scheduled transportation services already had been in existence in England and France for quite some time, but they employed steam-driven vehicles.


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