Büssing AG
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| Industry | Manufacturing |
|---|---|
| Fate | Merged with MAN AG |
| Founded | 1903 |
| Defunct | 1971 |
| Headquarters | Braunschweig, Germany |
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Key people
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Heinrich Büssing (1843-1929) (founder) |
| Products | Trucks and buses |
Büssing AG was a German bus and truck manufacturer, established in 1903 by Heinrich Büssing (1843–1929) in Braunschweig. It quickly evolved to one of the largest European producers, whose utility vehicles with the Brunswick Lion emblem were widely distributed, especially from the 1930s onwards. The company was taken over by MAN AG in 1971.
At the age of 60, the inventor and businessman Heinrich Büssing together with his two sons founded the Heinrich-Büssing-Spezialfabrik für Motorwagen und Motoromnibusse. Büssing, the son of a blacksmith dynasty at Nordsteimke (in present-day Wolfsburg), had studied engineering at the Collegium Carolinum in Braunschweig and had founded several bicycle, engineering and railway signal works with varying degress of success. His first truck was a 2-ton payload machine powered by a 2-cylinder gasoline engine and featuring worm drive. That successful design was later built under license by other companies in Germany, Austria, Hungary and by Straker-Squire in England.
One year later he debuted a first 20 HP omnibus model carrying up to twelve passengers on the route from Braunschweig to Wendeburg, operated by his own Automobil-Omnibus-Betriebs-Gesellschaft. Büssing busses soon served public transport in European cities like Berlin (ABOAG), Vienna and Prague (Fross–Büssing), or London.
Before World War I Büssing started to build heavy-duty trucks for the time. These trucks featured 4- and 6-cylinder engines (5 tonnes and 11 tonnes, respectively). In 1914 the Büssing A5P armored car was developed at the behest of the German Oberste Heeresleitung. After the war, Heinrich Büssing had to enter a Kommanditgesellschaft limited partnership, converted into the Büssing AG in 1922. In 1923, Büssing introduced the first rigid three-axle chassis which was used in upcoming models and allowed Büssing to lead the market share in Germany in commercial vehicles.
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Wikipedia