It’s a happy day for REV Group, a specialty vehicle manufacturer. The company was awarded a five year contract by the Fire Department of New York to create 425 Type I Wheeled Coach ambulances. The entire contract is worth $160 million, as the FDNY specifically asked the company to manufacture a variety of vehicle configurations, the first rigs to be ready to ship halfway through 2020’s fiscal year.

The FDNY will be keeping some things the same while improving aspects of the design to meet new goals. For example, the new vehicles will use the classic Ford F-550 4×4 chassis but also include an auxiliary power unit as part of the FDNY Green Initiative. The power unit will allow the ambulance to operate without leaving the engine running while the vehicle is idle.

The new rigs will also include high-visibility reflective safety graphics as well as a Vista brake lock to protect against vehicle theft.

The new ambulances could not come at a better time for the FDNY, which ran a record breaking 1.9 million ambulances runs in 2018. After a chance for multiple companies to bid on the contract, REV Ambulance Group Orlando, Inc. won out with its Wheeled Coach brand of vehicles that the FDNY believe will meet their requirements for both form and function.

“FDNY responds to a staggering 5,100 EMS calls a day, and the ambulances we build for them run non-stop. The learning we obtain from designing and building FDNY’s vehicles for the past ten years is evident in every ambulance we make,” stated Tim Sullivan, CEO of REV Group, in an interview with FireFightNation.com. “We build a better ambulance because of it.”

FDNY is not new to the Wheeled Coach brand, as they currently operate 660 of them today. Based off of budget projections, the new fleet of ambulances will be rolled out over the course of a couple of years. This will help the FDNY include new ambulances fairly regularly into their operational fleets.

This article was informed by reporting from FireFighterNation.com