Majority owner Ashok Leyland has renamed part of Optare as Switch Mobility and will eventually phase out the Optare brand name when it ceases building diesel-engined buses.
The Indian parent company, part of the Hinduja Group and its home country’s second largest bus and truck manufacturer, says this is part of a plan to turn the smallest of the UK’s bus builders into the developer of electric vehicle platforms for buses, light commercial vehicles and personal transport pods for world markets, starting in continental Europe and India.
The limited company Optare Group has been renamed Switch Mobility and will focus exclusively on electric vehicles, but the separate limited company Optare UK will retain its name and continue to focus on vehicles with internal combustion engines.
At a future date yet to be announced, Optare’s existing range of electric vehicles — Metrodecker, Solo, Metrocity and Versa — will be badged as Switch products.
These changes involve three separate companies, only one of which has been renamed. Optare Group Ltd, now Switch Mobility Ltd, is the original company called Optare Ltd from March 1985 until December 1998, taking its name from the Latin for ‘I choose’. This was the bu…