About Us - Company History of Thomas Built Buses

The history of Thomas Built Buses reads much like the history of modern mass transportation. It begins in 1916 in the small North Carolina city of High Point. Economic hard times created by World War I forced the closing of Southern Car Works, a major streetcar manufacturer based in High Point. Canadian-born car designer Perley A. Thomas lost his job as chief engineer for the company, but a few months later was contacted by Southern Public Utilities Company and asked to consider putting together a crew to renovate several streetcars he had designed for his former employer.

Within weeks, Thomas had reassembled many of his former coworkers, purchased a building in downtown High Point and opened the Perley A. Thomas Car Works. Thomas' reputation in the industry opened doors nationwide and within a few years, Thomas-built streetcars were carrying passengers in many of North America's largest cities.

By the late 1930s, cars and buses were beginning to make streetcar transportation obsolete. Perley A. Thomas Car Works adapted, and in 1936 ceased production of streetcars and launched a new product: school buses. As the 1940s began, Perley Thomas continued to provide his design skills to the company even as he began turning over day-to-day operation of the business to his children. He actively served as a design consultant to the business until the time of his death in 1958 at the age of 84.

Thomas's children and grandchildren proved to be worthy business leaders and smart bus designers, and by the early 1960s, the Thomas Car Works had built a national reputation in the school bus business. In 1978 Thomas introduced its first bus chassis and began producing the popular Saf-T-Liner® transit-style bus. Thomas expanded to manufacture a smaller conventional school bus, the Minotour, and later entered the commercial transit market in the 1980s.

In 1998, Thomas Built Buses became a wholly owned subsidiary of Freightliner LLC, a Daimler company. The strength of Freightliner LLC, now known as Daimler Trucks North America LLC, has helped Thomas grow and adapt to changes in the transportation industry.

The future of Thomas Built Buses looks bright. In 2004 Thomas added a 275,000 square-foot, state-of-the-art plant in High Point to manufacture its newest bus: the Saf-T-Liner® C2. The C2 is a next-generation conventional bus designed for superior durability, reliability and safety. It is set to revolutionize the industry.

(The complete history of Thomas Built Buses can be found in the book, "From Rails to Roads: The History of Perley A. Thomas Car Works and Thomas Built Buses," by Clint Johnson. The book was published in 1996 by Lifescapes and is available by calling American Identity at 1-800-332-1709.)