Thomas Built Buses
| Thomas Built Buses Inc. | |
|---|---|
| legal form | Inc. |
| founding | 1916 |
| Seat |
High Point , North Carolina , United States
|
| management | Roger Nielsen ( CEO and President ) |
| Number of employees | 1600 |
| Branch | Omnibuses |
| Website | www.thomasbuiltbuses.com |
Thomas Built Buses is a US manufacturer of buses and coaches and a subsidiary of Daimler Trucks North America . The company, based in High Point , North Carolina, is best known for its school buses, which are used almost throughout the United States. The company is the oldest bus manufacturer in North America that is still producing today.
After the tram manufacturer Southern Car Company closed down in 1916, the native Canadian, company founder and engineer Perley A. Thomas was soon looking for a new job. He found this when the Southern Public Utilities Company asked him to repair several trams for them, which he had designed for his previous employer. This order led to the founding of the Perley A. Thomas Car Works , which quickly employed many of Thomas' former colleagues and built trams for several American cities over the years. The company stopped the production of tram sets in 1936 and began to manufacture school buses to take into account the increasing importance of buses for mass transport. Thomas gradually passed the management of the company on to his children and died himself in 1958 at the age of 84. Under the aegis of his children and grandchildren, the company developed into one of the leading suppliers of school buses. This happened after a change of company from 1972 under the name Thomas Built Buses . In 1998 Thomas was taken over by Freightliner , a company of the Daimler group. Blue Bird Corporation is a competitor in the American school bus market .
