CarBrandLogos archive · MAN · 1996
One low-floor platform that swallowed six earlier bus families and never stopped selling.
Discover the storyPhoto: Bahnfrend · CC BY-SA 4.0
The story
Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the MAN Lion's City, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.
01
Before 1996, MAN's urban bus catalogue was an alphabet soup — NL, NG, ND, NM, EL, each a slightly different answer to a slightly different city contract. The Lion's City name gathered them into a single low-floor family and gave the range something it had lacked: recognisable identity.
MAN MAN Lion's City · Papper · CC BY-SA 4.0
02
What it sells is flexibility rather than novelty. The same architecture is built as a short midibus, a standard single-decker, an articulated bendy-bus and a double-decker, and it has been assembled in Germany, Poland, Turkey, South Africa and Malaysia to suit local rules and local labour costs. Operators can specify diesel, compressed natural gas, diesel-electric hybrid or, since the end of the 2010s, the fully battery-electric Lion's City E.
Gimpo1002-MAN · *Youngjin · CC BY-SA 3.0
03
That adaptability is why a design introduced in 1996 is still in production. A second generation arrived at the end of the 2010s with new bodywork and a redesigned driver's area, but the underlying proposition is unchanged: a modular city bus that a transport authority can order in almost any length and any powertrain, from one supplier, with one parts catalogue.
KMB MAN ND323F 12m · Kenneth Li · CC BY-SA 2.0
At a glance
Produced
1996–presentBody
MidibusTechnical specification
Badge at launch
This is the marque emblem that accompanied the MAN Lion's City's era. The full identity timeline is documented in the brand archive.
Explore the logo history →Contemporaries from the 1990s
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