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The Low Floor Series (LF) bus is a series of transit buses manufactured by NovaBus for North American customers. After taking over the former GM bus plant in St Eustache, Quebec, from MCI in 1993, Novabus management was invited by the Quebec government to design and produce a low-floor bus similar to a current trend on the European transit market. Novabus chose to adapt the Dutch Den Oudsten Alliance low floor bus for the North American market. A demo bus along with some engineering staff were sent from Holland; however by 1994 Den Oudsten was in financial trouble and was not able to further collaborate with Novabus which in turn had to design a low-floor bus from scratch. It is worth noting that the limited engineering staff that was acquired by Novabus along with the bus plant had never designed a complete bus; the Classic was a cosmetic revision of the GM New Look bus, which had been designed by GM in Detroit in the late 50's. The first prototype was shown at the APTA show in Boston, fall 1994; full development postponed production until 1996. In parallel Detroit Diesel had announced that 1994 would be the end of the road for its two stroke diesel engines that had traditionally provided power for North American transit buses since the 50's; the two stroke technology could just not be made to complete with new EPA regulations. While Novabus initial plan was to introduce the low-floor LFS while maintaining the lower cost Classic in production, the initial release of the Cummins powered Classic "T-Drive" in 1995 was underdeveloped and plagued with severe reliability problems. A decision was made to concentrate development resources on the new LFS and to stop producing the Classic as soon as the LFS was in full production. These events canceled the initial plan to produce a pilot run of 80 LFS to be put in revenue service in 4 major Quebec transit properties, then gather reliability and service data to further refine the design before entering serial production. By the time the first LFS (STCUM 16-004) entered revenue service at the end of 1996, about 400 LFS were already built, awaiting acceptance from the same Quebec properties. Again, these early LFS were plagued with reliability and serviceability problems; but unlike the Cummins powered Classics, the problems were all over the bus and not concentrated on the drivetrain. ==Models== The current LF is offered in seven models: LFS Shuttle and LFS Suburban are variants outside of the regular products offered. In addition, Nova Bus is working on an electric variant with a multitude of power source options. CNG articulated buses are not offered.〔(NovaBus )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Nova Bus LF Series」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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