Jakab Industries was an Australian

coachbuilder A coachbuilder or body-maker is someone who manufactures bodies for passenger-carrying vehicles.Construction has always been a skilled trade requiring a relatively lightweight product with sufficient strength. The manufacture of necessarily ...

Tamworth, New South Wales Tamworth is a city and administrative centre of the north-western region of New South Wales, Australia. Situated on the Peel River (New South Wales), Peel River within the local government area of the Tamworth Regional Council, it is the largest ...

History

Jakab Industries built its first bus body in July 1973, a Ford R226. It mainly made bodies for buses for the defence forces, but also built some for commercial operators, before withdrawing from the market in late 1995. It also built bodies for ambulances and postal vans. In the 1990s it also overhauled

Mercedes-Benz Mercedes-Benz (), commonly referred to as Mercedes and sometimes as Benz, is a German luxury and commercial vehicle automotive brand established in 1926. Mercedes-Benz AG (a Mercedes-Benz Group subsidiary established in 2019) is headquartere ...

and

Scania Scania, also known by its native name of Skåne (, ), is the southernmost of the historical provinces of Sweden, provinces (''landskap'') of Sweden. Located in the south tip of the geographical region of Götaland, the province is roughly conte ...

buses for the

State Transit Authority The State Transit Authority of New South Wales, also referred to as State Transit, was an agency of the Government of New South Wales operating bus services in Sydney. Superseding the Urban Transit Authority in 1989, it was also responsible for ...

. Following the collapse of

Clifford Corporation Clifford Corporation was a listed Australian company that purchased several bus manufacturing businesses in the mid-1990s before collapsing in November 1998. History In August 1995 Clifford Corporation purchased the Ansair Ansair was an Aust ...

in 1998,

Volvo The Volvo Group ( sv, Volvokoncernen; legally Aktiebolaget Volvo, shortened to AB Volvo, stylized as VOLVO) is a Swedish multinational manufacturing corporation headquartered in Gothenburg. While its core activity is the production, distributio ...

arranged for Jakab to take over the

Ansair Ansair was an Australian bus bodybuilder owned by Ansett Transport Industries and later the Clifford Corporation. History Ansair was founded by Reg Ansett in 1945 at Tullamarine, to make bodies for his Ansett Pioneer coaches, as well as manufa ...

plant in Tamworth and complete the work of providing Orana-style bodies for 60 State Transit Authority

Volvo B10BLE The Volvo B10BLE was a rear-engined low-entry single-decker bus chassis manufactured by Volvo in Sweden between 1993 and 2004. The first prototypes were built in 1992, but mass production started in 1993, only a year after the high-floor B10B. It ...

buses. The subsidiary company set up to do the work was named Phoenix Bus. Jakab Industries was placed in administration in 2002.

References

{{Australian bus manufacturers, state=collapsed Bus manufacturers of Australia Australian companies established in 1973 Australian companies disestablished in 2002