In 1968 the company introduced a bus model called Marcopolo, and three years later it took that name for its own. By the late years of the decade it was turning out bodies for trucks with adaptable chassis. Nicola expanded in the 1960s and bought two other bodybuilders, one in Caixas do Sul, the other in Porte Alegre. Whatever the customer wanted." By contrast, he said, the company's rivals, "were arrogant with customers, setting the price and the style and telling the people, 'Take it or leave it.' We went out with our shirtsleeves up, looking for customers everywhere." Its first export order was in 1961, from a bus company in Uruguay. "We could make special seats," Bellini told Millman, "give the customer a bigger or smaller luggage rack, or fruit racks for buses in farm towns.
could not compete with bigger bodybuilders on price or delivery time, but it offered superior service. However, in 1957 it opened a real manufacturing facility in a suburb of Caixas do Sul. "Everything was handmade." By 1954, when the company was incorporated, it was producing bus bodies however, with only 15 employees, it essentially remained an artisanal enterprise, taking three months to make a single one.
#BUS MARCOPOLO TRIAL#
"It was all trial and error at first," Bellini recalled to Joel Millman, writing for Forbes almost a half-century later. The first order came from a local commuter bus line, and Nicola built the body on a truck chassis. Settled by Italian immigrants to Brazil's southernmost state, this city abounded in small-scale manufacturing enterprises, many of them founded by skilled metal and wood craftsmen working out of shops in backyards and basements. Under the name Nicola & Cia., it plated and painted cabins for trucks in Caixas do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul. The company was founded by Paulo Bellini and six other young mechanics in 1949. Marcopolo sells its vehicles under such brand names as Volare, Fratello, Andare, Paradiso, Viaggio, Torino, and Viale, and it has factories in five other countries: Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Portugal, and South Africa. The company also repairs these vehicles and makes automotive parts.
Its production includes bodies for both urban and highway-transportation buses, and for motor coaches, vans, and recreational vehicles. manufactures almost half of all buses and microbus bodies built in Brazil and is the third largest manufacturer of bus bodies in the world.
0 kommentar(er)
