Shop Notes · Industry Insider
"Altoona tested" sounds like a credential, and it can be one. But the test itself changed completely in 2016, and the difference between the old version and the new one is the difference between "the bus went to the track" and "the bus met a federal standard and here's the score." If you're comparing buses, you need to know which one you're looking at.
For most of the program's history, the federal durability test at the Altoona, Pennsylvania facility worked like this: the bus ran the punishment track, things broke, the manufacturer fixed them, and the test continued. At the end, the facility published a report describing what happened. That was it. There was no pass/fail line. There were no minimum performance standards, and no limit on how many hours a bus could spend in the shop mid-test. A bus could suffer repeated failures, get patched up each time, complete the mileage, and walk away with a completed test on its record — and unless a buyer sat down and read the full report line by line, "Altoona tested" looked exactly the same on that bus as on one that sailed through.
In 2016 the Federal Transit Administration rewrote the program (it lives in federal regulation as 49 CFR Part 665). The current test issues a scored report with an aggregate score and a pass/fail verdict, built from performance standards across categories including structural integrity, safety, reliability, and maintainability. The one worth memorizing: a bus may accumulate no more than 125 hours of total unscheduled maintenance across the entire test. Blow past that and the bus fails — no amount of mid-test repair work papers over it, because the repair time itself is what's being measured. Unscheduled maintenance hours are a direct preview of what the bus will cost you to keep on the road.
Two buses can both claim "Altoona tested." One means: completed a test under a regime with no minimum standards and no verdict. The other means: passed the current scored test, with every repair and every maintenance hour published for anyone to read. Those are not the same claim, and the marketing copy will not tell you which is which. The reports will — they're public. Ask any builder two questions: which version of the test was your bus tested under, and will you send me the report? A builder proud of the answer sends the PDF the same day.
The HLE MAVRYK went through the current 7-year/200,000-mile test — the scored, pass/fail version — and passed with an 82.6 aggregate score: 100% reliability, 98% safety, 97% structural integrity, and 53.81 hours of unscheduled maintenance against the 125-hour allowance. The full report is public, and we'll hand it to anyone who asks. Then we took what the test surfaced and made the bus better. The STRYKR is in testing now; the KAVLYR is being built for the test track.
Related reading: How to check any builder's Altoona report in ten minutes · Altoona by the numbers: reading the MAVRYK's federal test report.