F Great Eastern
Established Member
The Olympus was on production over 4 financial years and sold 264 units for an average of 66 per year.
The Omnidekka was in production over 9 financial years and sold 578 units for an average of 64 per year.
Those figures are highly misleading and not comparing like with like. You cannot compare the sales of the Olympus on all the different chassis types it was built on, with the Omnidekka that was only been built on the Scania chassis. A more fair comparison would be Scania chassis Olympus vs Omnidekkas.
The simple fact is that if a predecessor outlasts it's successor, then the successor really cannot be seen to be a successful product. If the Scania based Olympus was such a good product then the Omnidekka sales should have fell off a cliff in favour of the Olympus, but that really did not happen and instead people passed over the Olympus and asked for more of what they know and liked.
Whilst the Omnidekka was on sale for 9 years, for the second half of those years they were only building them for a handful of customers and turned many away. Some of which went for the Olympus whilst others went to ADL, Wright, amongst others that Optare is still feeling the pinch of today as independents and smaller operators were unhappy that Optare refused to build them an Omnidekka in small or single examples but would build them an Olympus that they didn't want or would still build Omnidekkas for bigger operators.
If both of the Omnidekka and the Olympus were on the open market for the period of time that you talked about as rivals then you'd have a point with your production figures, but the fact that a sales environment that was manufactured by Darwen / Optare to heavily discourage Omnidekka sales in favour of the Olympus, the Olympus still couldn't beat an older design, tells you everything you need to know. The idea was for the Olympus to kill off the Myllenium and Omnidekka line but it was never able to do that.
That's before we even mention the Esteem.