page_title: Flxible New Look bus
section_title: Competition with General Motors
hierarchical_section_title: Flxible New Look bus / Competition with General Motors
caption_attribution_description: Side and rear view of a Flxible "New Look" bus in 1984. This is TriMet bus 469 (ex-628), a 35-foot-long, 96-inch-wide Flxible built in 1971. Originally numbered in the series 601–650, it was among 31 buses in that group to be overhauled in 1983–84 and renumbered into the series 455–485 for continued use. The work included repainting into a new paint scheme the agency adopted in fall 1980. The last active buses in this series were retired in 1989. Bus 469 is shown laying over on the east side of 21st Avenue at Jackson Street, at TriMet's Milwaukie Transit Center, in downtown Milwaukie, Oregon.
context_page_description: The Flxible New Look bus was a very popular transit bus introduced in 1959 by The Flxible Company, and produced from 1960 until 1978, when the New Look was replaced by the "870" Advanced Design Bus. Over its 17-year production run 13,121 Flxible New Look buses were manufactured.
context_section_description: During the 1960s, Flxible was the only large-production competitor to General Motors in the American transit bus market, although it was still a distant second with GM building more than twice as many buses. The Flxible New Look bus bears a close resemblance to the GM New Look bus, and in fact Flxible New Looks were commonly equipped with GM engines. This was due largely to the consent decree resulting from the 1956 anti-trust case United States v. General Motors Corp. which mandated that GM's bus components, engines, and transmissions be made available for sale to other manufacturers, free of royalties. However, it should also be noted that prior to the consent decree a small number of earlier model (pre-New Look) Flxible buses were built with GM engines, at the same time that GM vice president Charles F. Kettering was also chairman of the board at Flxible. It has been suggested that prior to the consent decree GM may have made its diesel engines available to Flxible in order to reduce the criticisms of GM's business practices that some felt were monopolistic.
  Another area of competition between the two manufacturers, but where Flxible had an advantage, was the market for 35-foot (10.7 m) long buses equipped with 8-cylinder diesel engines. In 1966 GM began offering its Detroit Diesel 8V-71 8-cylinder diesel engine on its 40-foot (12.2 m) New Look transit buses; however GM would not equip its 35-foot (10.7 m) models with anything larger than the 6V-71 6-cylinder diesel engine. In response to the desire by some transit agencies for a shorter bus with a larger engine (mainly for hilly routes, freeway driving, or to provide extra power for air conditioning equipped buses), Flxible offered its 35-foot (10.7 m) New Look with the Detroit Diesel 8V-71, the Cummins 165-285, and the Cummins 903 8-cylinder diesel engines.
caption: Left side and rear of a 1971-built 35-foot bus equipped with air-conditioning
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