The achievement of a very special double milestone was celebrated in Warsaw on May 13, 2005: Wolfgang Presinger, Head of the Mercedes-Benz Bus and Coach unit of EvoBus GmbH, together with Johannes Lehmann, Head of the Polish EvoBus subsidiary EvoBus Polska Sp.zo.o., presented the 100th Mercedes-Benz Tourismo coach to be sold in Poland to Jan Sidorowicz, managing director of the Warsaw-based travel operator Orbis-Transport. The vehicle is one of a total of six Tourismo coaches recently delivered to Orbis-Transport. The presentation formed the highlight event of the open days staged by EvoBus Polska at its Warsaw Service Centre on May 13 and 14, 2005 to celebrate its fifth anniversary in style together with all of its customers and staff.

The milestone model, a 12-m long Mercedes-Benz Tourismo RHD high-deck tour-ing coach, is powered by an OM 457 LA turbodiesel engine. The 310-kW/422-hp Euro 3 six-cylinder power unit is coupled with a GO 190 transmission from Mer-cedes-Benz and a Voith VR 115 E retarder. The coach also boasts a long list of ad-ditional equipment features, including a powerful Webasto air conditioning sys-tem, an Eltesan galley with a refrigerator behind the centre entrance door, an ex-tra refrigerator from Frenzel with a capacity of 42 litres between the driver’s and courier’s seats, plus a Blaupunkt video system with one monitor in the front and one in the centre of the coach.

Orbis-Transport is Poland’s largest coach operator. A subsidiary of the long-standing travel agent, Orbis, it has been operating successfully on the international travel market for 30 years now. Its regular-service routes run from Poland to over 100 cities in Europe, with one route even taking passengers as far as Morocco. Orbis-Transport has furthermore teamed up with Hertz in the vehicle rentals sec-tor and also leases vehicles to passenger car fleets. The coach pool currently comprises 41 vehicles, including 32 models sporting the Mercedes three-pointed star. The company has some 200 employees on its payroll, including 100 working as drivers or in the company’s own workshops and 100 administrative staff.

Visitors to the open days at the Service Centre in Warsaw were treated to a highly entertaining programme in a tented hall and outside in the Service Centre’s grounds. Live music, a driving course and an exhibition of a representative cross-section of the Mercedes-Benz, Setra and Chrysler bus, coach and passenger car ranges were just a few of the attractions on offer. The entertainment was com-plemented by practical demonstrations of various vehicle systems (air-conditioning units and on-board diagnosis, for instance), as well as by hands-on activities for visitors, including creating their own bus and coach designs, affixing decals to buses and coaches or tracing parts for repairs in the workshop hall. In the After Sales section, experts from the Omniplus services sector were on hand to present a wide range of special offers for bus and coach operators, such as genuine re-placement parts for buses and coaches, the „Air Conditioning Check 2005“ and the „Brakes 2005“ campaign.

EvoBus Polska Sp.zo.o. was founded at the turn of the millennium in 2000. In 2004, the overall bus and coach market in Poland totalled 1083 units, with EvoBus Polska securing a market share of 5.4 % (Mercedes-Benz Bus and Coach unit: 3.7 %, Setra Bus and Coach unit: 1.7 %). The figures for just the coach segment, meanwhile, show EvoBus Polska emerging as the market leader in 2004 with sales of 45 coaches and a market share of 35.3 % (Mercedes-Benz: 21.2 %, Setra: 14.1 %). The best-selling coach in Poland is the Mercedes-Benz Tourismo, which notched up sales of 17 high-deck touring coaches (Tourismo RHD) and 6 super-high-deck touring coaches (Tourismo SHD) models in 2004.