The Gala is shuddering. The new bus seat from the Spanish company FAINSA is shaken so violently that only 24 hours in a test machine are equivalent to one year of daily use. FAINSA guarantees the seat for five years, but tests are run much longer than that. Juan Canals, technical executive at the company, now knows that the first seat for which FAINSA has used high strength steels is at least as good as its predecessor, even though its weight has been cut by more than 30 percent.

FAINSA came into contact with high strength steels back in the 1990s. The possibilities offered by the material aroused thoughts, but neither passenger carrying capacity nor safety requirements were then the subject of particularly lively discussion.

Today it is different. The safety of bus traffic has been subjected to detailed scrutiny in the EU. Several countries, including the important markets in Great Britain and Italy, decided to specify three-point seatbelts for long-distance buses. The same rules will eventually apply in all EU countries.