What Is Fernbus Simulator? The Coach Sim Built Around FlixBus

Most bus simulators put you in a city, stopping every few hundred metres. Fernbus Simulator does the opposite: it hands you a full-size touring coach and points you at the motorway. It is the one big simulator built entirely around the long-distance coach — and it carries an official FlixBus licence, so the bright-green machines you drive are the real thing.

We spend our days with coaches in Proton Bus Simulator, so a game built around the same kind of vehicle is right in our lane. Here is what Fernbus Simulator is, how its sequel Tourist Bus Simulator expanded the idea, where both sit next to OMSI and the rest — and what a coach sim actually feels like to drive.

What Fernbus Simulator actually is

Fernbus Simulator (full name Fernbus Coach Simulator) was developed by the German studio TML-Studios and published by Aerosoft. It launched on Windows on 25 August 2016 and is built in Unreal Engine 4. A console version for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S followed on 28 February 2023.

The name tells you the whole idea. Fernbus is German for "long-distance bus". The game is the working day of an intercity coach driver: you take a big coach out onto the Autobahn, hold a schedule between cities, and manage a calm, high-speed cruise rather than a stop-start city loop. It is the same lesson every serious bus sim teaches — the skill is smoothness, not speed — but stretched across a country instead of a neighbourhood.

The FlixBus licence: real coaches in real green

What makes Fernbus stand out is that it was built in cooperation with FlixBus. The coaches wear the real FlixBus green, and they are officially licensed models — "licensed buses from MAN, VDL, Scania, and Neoplan that Flixbus uses for their fleet." The flagship is the MAN Lion's Coach (and the Lion's Coach C), the same long-distance MAN you see all over the real coach world.

The map is real too, at least in outline. TML recreated "approximately 20,000 km of the German FlixBus route network" — scaled down to a playable size — linking more than 40 German cities, with later expansions reaching neighbouring countries such as Austria, Switzerland, France and the Netherlands.

This is the same trick our FlixBus explainer describes from the real world: FlixBus barely owns any coaches, so its green fleet is a mix of whatever its partner operators run. Fernbus takes that many-badges-under-one-paint idea and lets you drive it.

Tourist Bus Simulator: the sequel that added a business to run

In 2018, TML followed Fernbus with Tourist Bus Simulator — the same coach-driving core, but with a company to manage on top. It launched on PC on 6 December 2018, and reached PS5 and Xbox Series X/S in May 2022.

The big change is the setting and the job. Instead of the German Autobahn, you are on the holiday island of Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, with 20 recreated towns, beaches and the island airport. And you do not just drive: you run the operator. You hire staff and negotiate their wages, assign routes, and keep the fleet maintained in the garage — the coach sim wrapped in a small business game. The MAN Lion's Coach is again the headline vehicle.

Where Fernbus sits among the bus sims

Fernbus and Tourist Bus fill a specific gap. The genre's most famous names are city sims: OMSI models a Berlin route in obsessive detail, and the console-friendly Bus Simulator series polishes the urban job. Fernbus is the coach-and-motorway answer instead. Here is the quick map:

We tell the full genre story in the history of bus simulator games, and pit the two big city sims against each other in Bus Simulator vs OMSI. Fernbus is the piece those two leave out: the open road. Like OMSI, it is moddable — through Steam Workshop — so its community adds skins and content on top of the licensed fleet.

What a coach sim actually feels like to drive

This is where a coach sim earns its place, because a long-distance coach drives nothing like a city bus — a gap we broke down in coach vs city bus. Drop into the Lion's Coach and the whole rhythm changes.

It is an endurance game, not a reflex one. The coach is tall and heavy, with a high floor riding over a deep luggage bay, so the machine leans into fast corners and takes real distance to pull up. You plan your braking far ahead, ease through the bends, and carry your momentum smoothly down the motorway instead of darting between stops. The reward is the long, composed cruise — reading the road a kilometre out and letting a big machine settle into its stride. After a while the empty Autobahn stops feeling like nothing is happening and starts feeling like the whole point.

Drive the same coaches in Proton Bus Simulator

Here is the catch every sim fan knows: mod formats do not cross over, so a Fernbus coach will not load into another game. But the real coaches Fernbus made famous already have a home in the Proton Bus Simulator scene. Browse the MAN bus mods for the Lion's Coach lineage, or the Scania catalogue for the Touring you also see in FlixBus green — and drive the open-road machine on your own routes today.

Hero image: FlixBus MAN Lion's Coach at Berlin ZOB by Florian Fèvre, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Full per-image credits appear in each caption above.