Ford doesn’t own Volvo AB. Ford owns the right to use the Volvo name to market passenger car. The heavy truck and bus company known as Volvo has nothing to do with Ford. In fact, Volvo actually owns the remnants of GM’s heavy duty trucks and bus business in North America. Volvo has extensive sales in the US via its MACK, Volvo, Nissan UD and White brands of trucks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo_Trucks

As far as the bus industry in the US is concerned, it is simply a reflection of our national priority. We don’t have any domestically owned bus company anymore precisely because public transportation is an afterthought and the center of innovation moved to Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. Now they have took over our bus market and we are better off for it. European bus and coach companies (which all the remaining US-based bus companies including NewFlyer) invented and perfected things like articulated and low floor buses, CNG propulsion, and all manner of electronic driving aids and safety features. We now benefit from having these things here. But keep in mind that the European lead is only in coach construction. Americans still play a leading role in hybridization and transmission technology. Although GM no longer make buses themselves, they are still the leading supplier of diesel and diesel hybrid drivetrains for buses in the US. And Allison Transmission is still the best provider of bus transmission in the world.

They ought to conscript Ford and GM into this reclamation, too, since they’re directly responsible for the messes created by cars in and around our cities!

Ford has a heavy-motor truck and bus line by its ownership stake in Volvo, but those buses are not available in the American market.

GM used to produce its own line of buses until divesting its bus unit in the mid-1980s. It exited a low-profit enterprise that built a quality product to focus on the more lucrative manufacturing of cars of middling quality.

The U.S. ceded the bus manufacturing industry to the Canadians and the Europeans. The European company that has captured much of the U.S. market is a Hungarian firm named … North American Bus Industries. (Metro almost exclusively buys NABIs).

We don’t really need a domestic bus industry, and our contribution is Buy America policy that creates jobs but at an unreasonable cost.