A Volvo spokesperson also claimed that the wires were fire retardant, four emergency exits through the windows were present and the fuel tank was at the front of the bus below the first axle. Volvo claims the fuel tank is designed in such a way that fuel will spill in case the tank is punctured. The report goes on to add that a Volvo technical team is looking into how an accident, which by all accounts wasn't a major one, could result in the fuel tank exploding and cause an inferno that claimed 45 lives. And going by this report in the New Indian Express, it was a fully Volvo built bus – the 9400 XL, which according to the Volvo India bus website is its top-of-the-line offering in India. Of course it fooled only the highly gullible, but in a country of 1.2 billion the proportion of the highly gullible is a not a small number.īut the bus involved in the Hyderabad tragedy was not a knock-off. Around two decades ago some buyers used to buy a Hindustan Contessa and get auto shops to make some modifications and lo and behold your humble Contessa turned into a Mercedes Benz overnight.
On its website Volvo boasts about the high quality of its bus bodies and buses itself, and that's no idle boast since the cost-conscious Indian traveller often does not mind paying nearly double to travel in a Volvo Bus as compared to normal buses.Īnd India being India, operators also deploy a whole series of Volvo knock-offs, especially in smaller cities.
However, in 2010 Volvo bought Jaico's 30 percent stake in the JV to make it a 100 percent Volvo subsidiary. In fact, the company was set up in 2006 as a JV with Jaico Automobiles, an Azad company, one of the largest traditional bus builders in India. Incidentally, Volvo also used a third-party bus body builder (Jaico) during its early years, but it seems like since the last 5-6 years Volvo builds all bus bodies internally, given that Volvo Buses India was set up for the specific purpose of building bus bodies. As compared to many Indian 'luxury' buses that are nothing more than a bus body plonked on top of a truck chassis, Volvo Buses are built on chassis' that are designed for a bus.
The tragic inferno raises many questions, and while the state of Indian roads and driving discipline has been quite literally discussed to death-in the couple of hours it took to write this article, nearly 50 Indians would have died in road accidents-the tragedy also raises questions about Volvo India Buses, safety standards for critical components like the fuel tanks and most importantly the lack of implementation of road safety standards by bus operators.įirst up, let's get one thing clear. The Volvo bus that caught fire on its way to Hyderabad.