Iveco Lorraine

The Lorraine was a touring coach produced from 1981 to 1993 under the badges of Unic and then Iveco. It was a Franco-Italian coproduction. Unic, a French firm controlled by Fiat V.I. since 1966, wanted a new lease of life for its bus and coach division and used the Fiat 370, launched in 1976 and widespread in Italy and Germany as the Magirus M2000, as the base for what became its last coach, the Lorraine, factory code 240. The Fiat 370 chassis was dressed in a body with a rounder, more aerodynamic front designed by the stylist Claude Setan of the French builder C.I.M.T., using aluminium and polyester parts and reinforced resin for the lower sides, so that resistance to corrosion became a selling point. Because French public buyers were told to buy French products, the coach was sold simply as the Unic Lorraine, without any reference to the Italian group. It was presented at Nice on 30 April 1981 and production began in autumn 1981, but the death of the C.I.M.T. chief executive and the withdrawal of the shareholders ended the accord, and after the first hundred units production stopped in December 1983. Iveco took the tooling for a symbolic franc and resumed building at Fourchambault in the Nièvre, with the first coach leaving on 31 January 1984. In 1984 it received a supercharged Fiat 8220.02 engine of 240 horsepower DIN and in 1985 a Fiat 8210.22 of 304 horsepower, and a raised grand touring version, the 300 GTS, was built in 22 examples from 1989. Roughly 660 Lorraines found buyers in twelve years, well below the initial aims, and the only export order was 50 coaches for Romania in 1988. It gave way to the 380 EuroClass, and the last Lorraine was built in 1992 and delivered in January 1993.