The first 56 Citaros were delivered in Budapest on 30 April 2013, right on schedule. Till Oberwörder, Head of Marketing, Sales & Aftersales Daimler Buses, handed over the vehicles in the presence of the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the Mayor of Budapest István Tarlós, the General Director of the Budapest Transport Centre, Dávid Vitézy, and Messrs Mátyás Dósa and Péter Szepesi, operators of the private bus company VT Transman GmbH.
These Citaros are the first vehicles to be delivered from the major contract signed with the Budapest City Authorities last November for the acquisition of a total of 159 Mercedes-Benz Citaros. With the second-generation Citaro, the city has opted for one of the most advanced urban bus concepts available on the market today. In addition, the Citaro is the most successful urban bus of all time. The over 33,000 units sold in just 14 production years express customers’ trust most tellingly.
The complete order consists of over 80 articulated units and 79 solo vehicles of the new Citaro generation. Thanks to Mercedes-Benz BlueTec diesel technology, both the articulated and the solo units comply with the environmentally-friendly EEV exhaust gas standard. Thanks to the buses’ low-floor design, elderly and persons with restricted mobility can easily get in and out of the vehicles or use the wheelchair ramp. Camera monitoring of the passenger compartment and the vehicle surroundings provide that extra quantum of safety to prevent vandalism damage to the vehicle as well as violent assaults on driver or passengers.
As from July the entire Mercedes-Benz urban bus fleet will provide comfortable and environment-friendly public transport in the metropolis on the Danube. Daimler Buses was able to implement a relatively short time of production of the entire slot, by using two production locations – a success of the EvoBus integrated production network. The new Citaro was manufactured in both the Mannheim bus production facilities and the factory in Neu-Ulm.
