PSVs are bouncing back
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• "The PSV market is still depressed — but it now looks as if it's past its worst," says managing director Hestair Duple, Richard Owen.
This year coach production at Hestair Duple is running 20% ahead of last year, and Owen reports," cumulative orders to date are well ahead of last year".
He believes that three factors have contributed to the increase in orders: Firstly, improvements to the company's model range; secondly, increasing confidence among operators combined with an easing in the effects of deregulation and privatisation; and thirdly, a reversal in the flood of imports into the UK.
British coach manufacturers and bodybuilders now have the right products to compete with the imports, says Owen, and currency changes have made it more difficult for importers to penetrate the British market.
In the past two weeks Hestair Duple has won orders from newly-privatised NBC companies, including an order for five Duple 340 bodies on midengined Daf chassis from Plympton Coaches, which owns Western National.
Owen says that dealer stocks of Hestair Duple coaches have been "coming down very satifactorily since Easter". Dealers are showing an improved commitment to PSV sales and it is even becoming a little difficult to get hold of chassis: "We haven't always got the chassis we've been promised,". "That is not yet affecting completion of our vehicles, but it could be affecting us up to Christmas."