Euro Truck Simulator 2 Coaches DLC: Everything We Know

For years, one request has echoed through the Euro Truck Simulator 2 community louder than almost any other: let us drive a bus. Now it's happening. SCS Software is building a Coaches DLC that puts licensed passenger coaches into ETS2 for the first time — and it just showed the first real gameplay. Here's everything confirmed so far.

SCS comes full circle

There's a neat symmetry to this. Long before SCS Software became the truck-sim powerhouse behind Euro Truck Simulator, it made a game called Bus Driver (2007) — an early title built entirely around driving passengers to a timetable. SCS went on to define the truck simulator, but buses were in its DNA from the start. The Coaches DLC brings that thread all the way back around: the studio that once had you dropping off passengers is doing it again, this time inside the best-loved trucking map in gaming. We told the wider story of the genre in the history of bus simulator games.

The first gameplay: the MAN Lion's Coach

On 5 July 2026, SCS published its first Coaches gameplay preview — a run with the MAN Lion's Coach on a route between Duisburg and Rotterdam. The studio was careful to call the footage a work in progress, but it was the first proper look at buses moving under the DLC's rules. The Lion's Coach, powered by MAN's D26 engine, is exactly the kind of long-distance touring machine the expansion is built around.

Three licensed coaches — so far

SCS is doing what it does with trucks: real, fully licensed vehicles. The store listing confirms three coaches for the DLC — the Scania Touring, the Volvo 9700 DD (a double-decker), and the MAN Lion's Coach. The wording leaves the door open for more, so treat these three as the confirmed starting line-up rather than the final roster.

It's a nicely varied trio: the Higer-bodied Scania Touring, the towering Volvo double-decker, and the German MAN flagship. If you want to understand why these high-floor machines are a completely different animal from a city bus, we broke it down in coach vs city bus.

It's a different job: passengers, not freight

This is the part that makes Coaches more than a reskin. Instead of a cargo you can't see, you're carrying people who react to how you drive. Passenger satisfaction is shaped by speeding, harsh maneuvers and overall comfort, and at the end of each trip a summary window shows how happy your passengers were. The loop is scheduled passenger transport — manage multiple stops, stay on schedule, and keep the ride smooth. It's the same truth every serious bus sim lands on: the skill isn't speed, it's smoothness.

Rebuilding Europe's bus stations

A surprising amount of the work is invisible. ETS2's map expansions — Italia, Road to the Black Sea, Beyond the Baltic Sea and others — were built years ago, before anyone was planning coaches. Their bus terminals weren't designed to actually load passengers. SCS says a significant part of Coaches development has gone into reworking those older assets, refreshing layouts and in many cases rebuilding the terminals from the ground up so a coach can pull in and work a real stop.

When is it out?

Not yet — and there's no date. The Steam listing shows the release as "to be announced," and SCS has stressed that everything shown is still work in progress. The Coaches DLC is confirmed and clearly deep in development, but for now the honest answer on timing is: unannounced.

What it will feel like to drive

A coach changes the whole feel of ETS2. A truck hauls a trailer that doesn't care how you drive; a coach hauls people who very much do. You'll plan your braking far ahead, ease through roundabouts, and carry momentum smoothly instead of stamping the pedals — because every harsh input is a hit to your passenger score. And the machines themselves are tall, heavy, high-floor cruisers: the Volvo 9700 DD stacks passengers over two decks, so its high centre of gravity leans into fast alpine corners in a way no truck cab ever will. It's the composed highway rhythm of a long-distance coach, dropped into the most detailed road network in the genre.

Drive these coaches in Proton Bus Simulator now

You don't have to wait for SCS to get behind the wheel of these exact machines. ETS2 uses its own mod format, so its coaches won't cross over — but the real coaches in the DLC already have a home in the Proton Bus Simulator scene. Browse the MAN mods for the Lion's Coach lineage, the Volvo range for its double-deckers, or the Scania catalogue for the Touring's siblings — and drive a coach today while the ETS2 version cooks. For the other big coach moment of 2026, see our roundup of Bus Simulator 27, which is bringing coaches to its series for the first time too.

Hero image: Volvo 9700 DD by Samson Ng (D201@EAL), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Full per-image credits appear in each caption above.