page_title: Thomas Built Buses
section_title: Company acquisition
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Built Buses / History / 1990s / Company acquisition
caption_attribution_description: English: A North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics activity bus, parked in the school's parking lot.
context_page_description: Thomas Built Buses, Inc. is an American bus manufacturer. Best known for its production of yellow school buses, Thomas produces other bus designs for a variety of usages; currently, its production is concentrated on school buses and activity buses and their commercial derivatives.
  Founded in 1916 as Perley A. Thomas Car Works, the company was renamed in 1972 to better represent its primary product lines. Headquartered in High Point, North Carolina since 1916, Thomas has been a subsidiary of Daimler Trucks North America since 1998. Prior to its acquisition, the company was operated by the Perley A. Thomas family, the final major school bus manufacturer operated under family control.
  Since 1936, Thomas has produced school buses in High Point, North Carolina. In addition to bus bodies, the company also produces vehicle chassis for its Saf-T-Liner/Transit Liner EFX and HDX buses.
context_section_description: Into the late 1990s, Thomas Built Buses remained a family-owned company, controlled by the fourth generation of the Thomas family and the Odyssey Group.    Following the departure of Wayne Wheeled Vehicles from the manufacturing segment, Thomas became the largest manufacturer, holding a 34% market share in 1996.  The same year, the Thomas family sold a majority stake of the company to the Berkshire Partners equity firm.
  Freightliner entered school bus manufacturing as a chassis producer in May 1996, unveiling the Freightliner FS-65 (derived from its FL60/FL70 Business Class medium-duty truck); developed in cooperation with Thomas, the first production Freightliner-chassis buses were produced at the beginning of 1997.  The product launch marked the first completely new school bus chassis since 1980, with Freightliner becoming the first new cowled-chassis manufacturer since the 1977 withdrawal of Dodge.
  Following its collaboration with Thomas in developing the FS-65 chassis, in October 1998, Freightliner acquired Thomas Built Buses in its entirety from the Thomas family and the Berkshire, retaining company president John W. Thomas III.  The largest school bus manufacturer in North America at the time, Thomas Built Buses was the last major manufacturer operating under family control.  At the time, Freightliner was undergoing a series of company acquisitions to diversify its product range beyond highway trucks.  Along with acquiring the rights to the Ford heavy-truck line (and Ford Cargo) in 1997 (continued as Sterling Trucks), Freightliner acquired Thomas alongside the chassis production of Oshkosh Corporation (1995), American LaFrance (1996).
  For school bus manufacturers, the 1990s marked a period of association between major body and chassis manufacturers.  In 1991, Navistar began its purchase of AmTran (completed in 1995); a year later, Blue Bird entered in a supply agreement with General Motors for conventional bus chassis.  1998 marked both the purchase of Thomas by Freightliner and the sale of Carpenter to Spartan Motors (its front/rear-engine chassis supplier).
  At the end of the 1990s, several changes made to the Thomas product line were related to its purchase by Freightliner.  At the end of 1998 production, Navistar ended its chassis production for the Vista; as the Vista body was developed solely for its chassis, Thomas discontinued the model line.  While Freightliner did not purchase the Ford medium-duty truck range or the school bus chassis derived from it, Ford ended production of the latter after 1998.  Consequently, from 1999 onward, the Saf-T-Liner Conventional was limited to Navistar or Freightliner chassis (along with AmTran/Ward, Carpenter, and Wayne, the last General Motors chassis for a Thomas bus was produced in 1991).
caption: Thomas Saf-T-Liner FS-65 (North Carolina activity bus)
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