On our visit in Zhengzhou, China, home of Yutong Bus & Coach

SUSTAINABLE BUS editorial staff has flown to the other side of the world, literally making themselves into two, or rather three: if one slice of the team has remained to man the office in Milan, another has packed its bags for Jakarta, for Busworld South East Asia, and yet another – the one that is writing – is in China, in Zhengzhou, at the home of Yutong Bus & Coach, which has organized a four-day event dedicated to the European trade press.

An opportunity to get to know up close, very close, indeed from inside the reality of the world’s largest manufacturer by volume: the company opened its doors to us and also those of the new plant in Zhengzhou (totally financed by Yutong itself), where we were able to visit a good part of the plant: from a touch and go in the production lines to the research and development departments, passing through the area dedicated to testing e and test drive circuit.

There are four Yutong factories in the motherland, all located in Zhengzhou: in the new, modern plant, where free self-driving minibuses run around to facilitate employee travel, the maximum daily production capacity is 32 buses per day, or 11,680 units per year, thanks to three to four thousand workers, which can go up and seven to eight thousand when the demand for labor picks up.

Considering all four plants, and all types of vehicles (including light and heavy truck, for example), Yutong is capable of churning out up to 150,000 units per year: really impressive!

In the face of a domestic demand that is heading toward stagnation, bus&coach production in the Dragon Country remains high, huge, and for this very reason houses, Yutong above all, have launched the offensive by exporting their products en masse.

As of today, just to rattle off a few numbers pitted against us by Yutong, there are 7,000 Yutong buses&coaches running on the streets of the Old Continent, 2,000 of them electric, while in 2023 Yutong exported 10.165 buses and coaches worldwide.

In the next issue of SUSTAINABLE BUS you will find a full report on our journey from Yutong: stay tuned