As if the U.S. motorcoach industry did not have enough to worry about, it now has to worry about the impact that the current Administration’s policies will likely have on it business. These impacts will likely include everything from declining ridership to higher prices for vehicles.
Of course, as most National Bus Trader readers and most other Americans know, the realities of tariffs – which only Congress technically has the power to impose – have been changing from day to day. Of course, the President does not care about this, has never been held accountable for any of his multiple crimes. and changes his mind about which country will pay what from day to day and from speech to speech. Plus, of course, various countries will retaliate in response to the tariffs America imposes on their exports to the U.S., and the degrees to which they will retaliate to our impositions are not clear at the time of this article’s writing. To this writer, at least, the purpose of these tariffs, regardless of their consequences, is crystal clear. But this is a bus magazine. The degree to which political decisions affect public transportation must unfortunately dip its toes into occasional political discourse only because the impacts of our nation’s current politics will have such an extraordinary impact on our field. As one tiny example cited below illustrates, these impacts already have.
Buying and Leasing Vehicles.
Obtaining vehicles is likely a good place to begin this discussion. Right now, the only domestic manufacturer of motorcoaches is MCI – and even that is not completely true. Owned by New Flyer, a bus manufacturer, MCI’s production is split between a U.S. facility in Pembina, North Dakota and another in Winnipeg, Manitoba. (The shells are shipped from Winnipeg to the Pembina plant where they are finished, to comply with our “Buy America” provisions.) Particularly as MCI is the only coach manufacturer tat U.S. transit agencies can buy (because of “Buy America,”), MCI dominates the American motorcoach market, although it makes and sells fewer of certain models (D4500 CRT LEs, and electric models like the J45 — CHARGE and D45 CRT CHARGE). Otherwise, I am not sure of which other countries some components may come from.
But even without the specifics, the tariffs placed on imported products from almost every nation in the world (with the exception of Russia, which is allegedly still burdened by U.S. sanctions) seem severe, often historically cruel (46% on Vietnamese imports to the United States) and often based on nothing (Vietnam claims it levies tariffs of only 9.5 percent on the U.S. goods it imports). While at the date of this writing the tariffs on various countries seem to shift from day to day, it is certain that the cost of any motorcoach will almost certainly increase substantially. And even if certain components currently manufactured outside the U.S. can be changed to domestic components, the costs of manufacturing them here could outweigh the savings from otherwise tariff-related costs.
Even if U.S. motorcoach companies and transit agencies cannot afford to obtain genuine motorcoaches, there are challenges involved in obtaining any bus or bus-conversion. Few if any vehicles are made with only parts available in their countries of origin, and the supply-chain headaches are daunting. This is even true for schoolbuses, all three of which are manufactured and assembled domestically. But again, even some of these vehicles’ parts are not made domestically.
One should keep in mind that every bus or coach contains thousands of parts. And were all needed to be made domestically, the cost of the finished product would soar from what it now is. In certain sectors – transit in particular – where passenger fares cover only a tiny fraction of operating costs, the need to manufacture each part domestically would still increase manufacturing costs, as well as cost the Federal government a considerable amount, since it pays for 80 percent of the costs of vehicles (and other capital costs) purchased by transit agencies or municipalities.
Particularly with electric vehicles (including new forays into the U.S. market), their electrical parts rely largely on many minerals referred to as “rare earths.” Unfortunately, just as no state other than Hawaii can grow a single coffee bean, there are many minerals not found (at least not yet) in the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii), and countries that have them can effectively hold us hostage by not selling them to us at all, and prohibiting the other importers to which they do sell them from re-selling them to us. Regardless, U.S. vehicle manufacturers are in a pickle, and we risk a near-term future of used integral buses and motorcoaches, supplemented by a mix of non-yellow schoolbuses and van, minibus and truck conversions built on chassis manufactured by Ford, GMC and Chrysler and, for larger vehicles, chassis built by International and Freightliner chassis. Even if some public transportation sectors could survive with such vehicles (despite their greatly increased costs), the motorcoach sector is less likely to be among them, given its size and lack of essentiality in the tour and charter sectors (compared to the commuter/express and intercity/scheduled service sectors).
The bus industry overall provides an excellent illustration of the costs versus benefits (if there actually are any) of President Trump’s tariff policies on industries like the motorcoach sector, since cost comparisons should be easier to evaluate for the production of only a few thousand vehicles a year – compared to the cost implications of similar trade-offs for automobile manufacturers producing millions of units per year, or buses produced in much larger quantities on chassis designed for trucks, whose product planning volume dwarfs that of integral buses and coaches. In contrast, we can expect the costs for relatively small subsidiaries like MCI, when amortized against such a small number of units sold, to increase extraordinarily. Regardless, to some degree seemingly impossible to pin down at the moment, the cost of a $400,000 motorcoach is certain to soon soar (if they have not increased already in anticipation of what is likely to materialize), as certain tariffs have ostensibly been locked into place in early April, 2025.
Straying unfortunately into politics – a necessity to discuss many of the points covered in this article – the reader is forced to guess whether the imposition of tariffs on any products of any kind will happen at all (i.e., again, only Congress has the power to levy them), especially as President Trump has shown a disregard (if not a disinterest in) what the U.S. constitution or the judicial branch of government considers legal, and has not yet been accountable for this disinterest or disregard. I suspect that most U.S. manufacturers of almost anything with more than a handful of moving parts is anticipating the worst. Bus and coach manufacturers are clearly among them.
Finally, in the motorcoach sector, these costs may be softened by the fact that we produce most of one motorcoach jointly in the U.S. and Canada – MCI. To notice that America is suddenly not well-liked by our former closest neighbor is a rabid understatement. Fortunately in the broad context of our recent political upheaval, MCI is already the most common motorcoach purchased in the United States, as well as the only one a public agency can purchase, thanks to “Buy America” provisions and the fact that, because of it, public agencies desiring motorcoaches can avoid the nuisance and accountability of having to go out to bid for the purchase of such vehicles.
Regardless, for those companies which must purchase motorcoaches, and whose purchases are obviously not subsidized by the FTA, the costs for all other motorcoaches imported into the U.S. should be substantially higher, even while all of them necessarily contain some U.S.-manufactured components as a practical matter. This reality may translate into the purchase of disproportionately more MCIs than other coaches which, until now, have provided stiff competition to MCI – like Prevost, Temsa, Irizar, Van Hool, Dennis and BYD — as well as some of the newer entries to the market like Wrightbus and Ebusco (if they survive here).
All this angst is a further shame since motorcoach sales in 2024 actually increased significantly most recently. According to Bus & Motorcoach News, the sale of new motorcoaches, overall, in the U.S. and Canada, increased by roughly 15 percent in the third quarter of 2024, compared to the same quarter a year earlier. And this increase is all the more significant since the number of motorcoaches sold and deployed in the United States has been relatively flat for seemingly decades, despite the increase in our population during this same period of time. Of course, one should expect the Canadian purchase of MCIs to fall off, even with one of its plants in Canada, as the sale of almost everything made in America will fall off in almost every country on Earth – which the possible exceptions of Russia and the Ukraine.
Ridership
The significant inflation that is almost certain to result from the tariffs – essentially a sales tax to be paid by buyers for foreign goods of almost every type, and which will simply pile up in our treasury — will almost certainly translate into less ridership. In the immediate short-term, when the near-future cost-of-living is so cloudy, and the cost of certain goods (most noticeably groceries) is already rising visibly, one can expect ridership in the charter and tour sectors to decline dramatically, just as taking vacations and other non-necessities will be less competitive with food, shelter, gasoline and utilities.
One irony that makes this prophesy so likely is that motorcoach riders are strongly a phenomenon of the Middle and Lower Classes. Those for whom motorcoach costs are insignificant rarely use them for charter, tour or intercity travel purposes. A small to moderate segment of commuter/express ridership is made up of relatively rich individuals, particularly where passenger rail service does not exist, or is less convenient. But subtleties like one’s proximity to stations or bus stops has an impact on the use of public transportation. My own experiences during my 24 years living in New York City, with a house in a rural-flavored suburban town during the last 10 years of it, well illustrate the dynamics of personal choice:
- When my office lay in Lower Manhattan, on Fulton Street – a half block away from a subway station but also close to a PATH station – I walked to the PATH station (a block south of the former North Trade Tower), and caught a train to the Greenwood Lake Park-and-Ride lot, where my trusty pickup truck would be waiting to ferry me to Warwick, New York (in the Lower Hudson Valley) – where I stayed from Thursday evenings through Sunday afternoons.
- When my office moved to the Financial District, the walk to the PATH station was too long, taxicabs crawled through bumper-to-bumper traffic for those 10 blocks or so, and instead, I took a subway to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where I caught a motorcoach to the Warwick Park-and-Ride lot, a 10 minute drive to my Warick house.
- During my final two years in New York City, my office on Riverside Drive and 158th Street lay a few short blocks from the George Washington Bridge, and that office building had a parking garage. So I purchased a sedan that I parked in the garage, and every Thursday evening I simply drove directly to my suburban home.
- When COVID-19 struck in 2020, I moved out of the New York City headquarters, and eliminated my weekly commute, altogether.
I cite this transition to illustrate the many factors that dictate the usually practical use of public transportation – including passenger rail, bus or motorcoach and personal occupancy vehicle (POV) – for almost anyone who does not live within walking distance of his or her workplace. (During my 14 years in Los Angeles, I relied solely on my car, while during my three years in Paris, I relied solely on my feet and a fabulous subway system.) But I was fortunate to always have choices. Those with fewer choices may have a less radical impact on their use of public transportation, or a more radical impact on such use. This reality places limits on the predictability of future ridership when any socio-economic or other variables change significantly – just as they did when COVID-19 struck (and further reduced public transportation ridership, which had already been declining, nationwide, by roughly 10 percent during at least the two years prior to the emergence of COVID-19).
Sadly, when motorcoach readers of National Bus Trader look back now, they may regret the countless recommendations for diversifying and expanding their service into new markets that the magazine offered in article after article. Ironically, it may be necessary to reconsider some of these markets now, as motorcoach fares are certain to rise. So I would advise readers of National Bus Trader (easily archived due to its brilliant transition into a purely digital format) to take a second (or even a first) glance at the many markets the magazine pointed them toward, and regular encouraged its readers to explore. These include the trio of articles about surviving in the Age of Covid-19 (see Motorcoach Survival – Part 1; Motorcoach Survival – Part 2 and Motorcoach Survival – Part 3); the 10 installments about different traditional markets literally begging for service subtitled “Making More Money” [see Making More Money – Part 1/; Making More Money – Part 2; Making More Money – Part 3; Making More Money – Part 4; Making More Money – Part 5; Making More Money – Part 6; Making More Money – Part 7; Making More Money – Part 8; Making More Money – Part 9 and Making More Money – Part 10), the general article about new opportunities for increased motorcoach usage (see New Opportunities for Motorcoach Usage) and the two articles outlining the huge market awaiting motorcoach innovators to compete with commercial airlines providing short- and medium-distance service (see Survival and Prosperity – Part 1 and Survival and Prosperity – Part 2). Particularly with respect to the last of these articles, where superior service to commercial airline service would involve a fraction of airline fares, often in less time (for when passengers could sleep on board), this foray into this rarely-served motorcoach market could withstand higher vehicle costs and higher fares – and still come out competitive with the amenities and fares of commercial airlines providing short- and medium-distance trips. The harsh reality is that the almost universal choice of doing nothing new will soon no longer be an option. A motorcoach provider will soon face the choice of making radical changes to its offerings or selling its fleet – with or without the other accoutrements of its business – below fire sale prices. Interestingly, a few OEMs have been paying attention. While the full “Magic Coach” whose features were outlined in the March, 2022 issue of National Bus Trader does not exist, at least one conversion company recently emerged to provide at least one important characteristic of this vision: Napaway’s new sleeper coach (Ultraliner).
Unfortunately, most new entries into the U.S. motorcoach market over the past half century have not done well, as one can see from this year’s March and April installments of the “Gone But Not Forgotten” series by National Bus Trader publisher/editor Larry Plachno so convincingly illustrated – an overview of the litany of the new and failed entries into the competitive U.S. motorcoach industry that one will never find anywhere else in such a condensed yet illustrative and instructive format. Yet given the times we are now living in, every motorcoach owner and driver should be rooting hard for Napaway and anyone else offering an upgraded motorcoach experience. And savvy motorcoach company owners who have been exposed to the vast range of unserved markets provided year after year in National Bus Trader (links to most of which are provided above) who wish to remain in this business should give serious consideration to both these markets and those vehicles which can serve them – at least those vehicles that will still be available and affordable as our nation’s physical and cost structures are so quickly being radicalized.
Recruiting and Driver Shortages
While certainly not as abysmal as it has been for the schoolbus sector, our nation’s motorcoach sector has experienced driver shortages throughout most of the country since President Reagan began sliding our tax structure from progressive to regressive 45 years ago. If one wishes to delve deeply into the consequences, I suggest Deaths of Despair, by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. For a shorter treatment, I recommend a recent NYTimes article titled “The Gen-X Career Meltdown” (see NYTimes – Article).
But this driver shortage may be over in the short run, as robots are increasingly replacing Live Earthlings in ways that one only foresaw in science fiction books and movies a mere decade ago. Motorcoach and other public transportation drivers may never earn what they are worth. But until driverless or “autonomous” vehicles completely dominate the public transportation landscape, the availability of drivers should increase as job opportunities elsewhere continue to shrink. Then again, the recent prohibition of virtually anyone to immigrate into this country will stifle this trend, as the dwindling work force already here will likely drift into more profitable endeavors. So the hard work and high skill levels needed to safety operate a motorcoach must manage to pay its drivers closer to what they deserve. At the same time, the extraordinary inflation we are already starting to experience will require the same dynamics in hiring almost anyone for any job. So the motorcoach industry must manage to find new markets, offer better service (some in the form of more versatile vehicles) and pay its workers competitive wages.
A word to the wise: With autonomous coaches just around the corner in the United States – they had been in operation in Europe for many years already, but have recently disappeared – someone spending nearly half a million dollars on a fancy coach requiring a driver should think about purchasing a really high-end vehicle with extraordinary versatility. A hard look at the vision of such a vehicle illustrated by “The Magic Coach” (again, see Survival and Prosperity Part-2) would be a good place to start while investing in a motorcoach that still requires a driver. Unfortunately, the tariff quandary may impede the emergence of such a vehicle.
Maintenance
There is not much to say about the impact of the new United States on vehicle maintenance. Bus and coach mechanics are already paid much better than the drivers of the vehicles they repair. And experts in such work are not likely qualified to do many other things – at least not things that will pay as well.
One important reality about vehicle maintenance is that, unlike drivers, mechanics are highly unlikely to be replaced by robots for quite a while. So this should not be a fear that motorcoach owners need fret over. However, the components “below the floor” may change a lot as tariffs disrupt the normal supply chain availability of spare parts, and manufacturers are forced for make substitutions for countless components, based largely on the relative costs of new tariff-driven spare parts. Such dynamics will almost certainly necessitate more training time for those performing maintenance. This is particularly true for both ICE vehicles and electric vehicles. So while labor costs may remain constant, it may soon take more mechanics to keep a given fleet moving.
Sales of Electric Coaches
With more attention on electric cars, the emergence of electric buses and coaches have been sneaking up on us. Among both buses and coaches:
- New Flyer introduced its first-ever hydrogen fuel cell-electric bus months ago, and already received an order for 108 of them. Mostly because of the cost of charging stations, the market for electric buses may be limited, unless or until such stations accommodate buses, trucks and personal occupancy vehicles (see Electric Schoolbuses – Part 1, Electric Schoolbuses – Part 2 and Electric Schoolbuses – Part 3 ).
- Manufacturer Wrightbus’ recently introduced a hydrogen powered double-decker bus, which would likely be deployed mostly in a sightseeing mode – a mode with different profit dynamics than the four more-traditional purposes for which motorcoaches are used (charter, tour, intercity/scheduled service and commuter/express service.) Given the natural sightseeing role of such models (treated here among coaches, and higher than a traditional bus, double deckers are technically built on low-floor buses).
One fascinating innovation rarely used, but for which closed-roof double-decker buses are more appropriate, is in transit service. And savvy coach manufacturers have designed their vehicles to accommodate factors like the height of bridge underpasses. In fact, Van Hool’s double-decker bus can fit in, and pass through, the Holland Tunnel, whereas the Alexander Dennis open-air double decker deployed, for example, in considerable numbers in New York City for sightseeing purposes, cannot do so. Another example with interesting implications is choice made by the City of Las Vegas (more appropriately the Regional Transit Commission of Southern Nevada) to eliminate fares for ridership on double-decker buses. The deployment of such vehicles would seem to be a natural path toward the greater recovery of operating costs by fares. But such opportunities are more prevalent in newer cities compared to older ones crisscrossed by bridges and tunnels whose heights limit the paths such vehicles can take.
Another concern is that a very promising recent entry into the electric bus field, Protera, went out of business last year. This harbinger of recent trends has been the high rate of cancellations of orders for another new entry into the electric motorcoach field: Ebusco, offering a battery-powered electric coach. Ebusco received 55 cancellations in the first Quarter of 2025. It is hard to know to what degree the recent explosion of proposed tariffs had an effect on these cancellations.
New Entries into the Field
A harbinger of serous concern in the New America already and quickly hated and loathed by the leaders of most other countries is the package of risks associated with a new vehicle’s entry into any public transportation market – much less a small one like the motorcoach sector, which for decades has contained a relatively stable 33,000 coaches, a small portion of which are lying idle in “pre-owned” bus lots. A great many coach manufacturers’ vehicles did not last terribly long in the U.S. market during what many would now consider “normal times.” Among the stream of coaches included in “Gone But Not Forgotten” (again, see the March and April issues of National Bus Trader for an eye-opening overview) are Scania, Dina, Viaggio (for awhile, a Dina Viaggio vehicle from their merger), Sabre Carriage Company, Invader (sort of a “converter” of MCI coaches), Cametal, TAM, Stallion, LAG, M.A.N., Mack/Renault, Bus & Coach International (BCI), Caio, Bus & Coach America (BCA), CHTC (including BonLuck Bus), and, most notably, Eagle (which enjoyed 36 years in the U.S. market) and Neoplan (which lasted 37 years in the U.S. market before it withdrew from it).
And then there is China. BYD appears to be the Chinese coach currently dominating the U.S. market among its Chinese competitors. Depending on the outcome of the tariff war, it is hard to know which Chinese bus or coach manufacturers currently producing vehicles for their domestic market (and possibly other markets) will enter the U.S. market. But there are 36 others, earning some form of a profit, still subsidized, or at least catching up to cover their investment. It is help to view this illustration of the success of public transportation in China, with respect to the issue of tariffs, to note that while China accounts for only 13 percent of global consumption, it accounts for a full third of global exports. Compared to concerns about fentanyl, this reality might help to explain and justify an increase on Chinese imports – although it clearly does not seem to explain the patchwork quilt of tariffs being proposed, and which seems to disregard an almost unlimited number of impacts.
Tragedies and Their Implications
As the quick tour of “Gone But Not Forgotten” illustrates, most coaches (particularly imports from other countries) did not last very long in “the car country” – largely for that reason and everything else that comes with it (e.g., urban sprawl, terrible planning and design of our fragmented, poorly-regulated public transportation network full of missing pieces, “Buy America” provisions, the quirks of our political structure like a Senate and an electoral college, radical swings in decision-making from president to president, and an educational system characterized by a huge rate of absenteeism (when half a century ago, truant officers largely prevented this) and the extremes in our distribution of wealth, among many other factors.
But these tragedies were far more serious for those bus and coach manufacturers that sold precious few vehicles here, and/or sold them for only a short time. And these tragedies were compounded by those companies with solid markets outside the United States and had to make enormous investments in tooling, and the establishment of aftersales facilities and networks, to accommodate the unusual requirements of the U.S. market – requirements like Buy America provisions (formerly requiring 50 percent U.S. content, and now 65 percent). For such reasons, public transit agencies wishing to purchase motorcoaches for computer/express runs (for which standees are not appropriate) can only purchase MCI coaches.
Regardless, selling only a relative handful of vehicles over a period of a few years did not remotely allow the manufacturer of a new entry an opportunity to amortize its considerable investment in creating or adapting a vehicle for a new market, and developing the support network for it, including dealerships, parts distributorships and often a limited number of repair facilities that had to be stocked with spare parts.
One example with which I am personally familiar is the TAM venture, which sold only 10 motorcoaches in the United State, and quickly sold another 30 that were never delivered (for reasons beyond any points of this article, and apart from any pluses or minuses of the vehicle). Of more interest here is that, unless the TAM 252 school/activity bus far superior to any schoolbus ever made in this country, and cost-competitive with those of Crown and Gillig (both of which left the market in 1991), the TAM 260 was not a better motorcoach. (Frankly, it was not as good a vehicle as the 252 school/activity vehicle.) However, while not better, it was a different vehicle: 12-meter coach on a single rear axle, with a Cummin’s 8.3L engine that delivered roughly 10 mpg. — an astonishing savings at the operating level. Plus, this coach entered the U.S. market at a significantly lower price-point for a new motorcoach: Its buyers had a choice between a 4- or 5-year-old, 40-foot MCI, Prevost, Van Hool, Dina Viaggio, or Neoplan (I may be forgetting a couple available in the early 1990s) or a brand-new TAM coach with the same seating capacity. This brief analysis contains important lessons for any OEM’s or conversion company’s entry into the U.S. even in “normal” times. To do so now, one has to think carefully about the recent cancellation of 55 electric Ebusco buses.
By the time the reader has concluded his or her review of this single article, America in general may be more fuzzy than it is now. So it is hard for a potential motorcoach owner or buyer to know what to do. Yet guiding such individuals has always been this publication’s principal focus, and a focus in which it has always excelled. Helping these individuals keep their passengers safe, keeping them away from the den of drooling lawyers, and providing ideas to help them survive and prosper are just extras. Often – and regular readers of National Bus Trader keeping track may have been surprised at how often our predictions came true – our advice was invaluable, even while few readers accepted it.
Without a crystal ball, it will be hard to predict the changes in motorcoach sales in our market. The costs for all of these vehicles is almost certain to increase – depending on how many of their parts consist of U.S. components. How seriously other nations impose “retaliatory tariffs” on any (or all) U.S. exports is another issue. So it will be hard to predict changes in sales of any vehicles whose components are part of the SAEI world to countries whose vehicles are made of components in the EU or Hino worlds. Some of these vehicles, like Brazilian manufacturer Marcopolo’s Viaggio’s coaches (with a plant in Mexico) likely contain more U.S. components than do most other country’s bus or coach products apart from those manufactured in Canada (as, again, many MCI coaches are, whose principal market is the United States).
While the lessons may remain the same, the twists and turns they take are another matter. One of my college history professors told us that one can begin any speech by stating, “It was a period of great change.” But now, readers of National Bus Trader (and every other magazine and every other medium) know this to be especially true. So my advice at this point is deliberately narrow and focused: “Be careful. “At the same time, “be adventurous in exploring new market niches and new opportunities – especially with new types of vehicles when you are lucky to find any.”