REV Ambulance Group celebrates their the 50th anniversary of Wheeled Coach in Winter Park, FL on Wednesday, March 19, 2025. (Alan Youngblood/Alan Youngblood Images)
By Walt Lewis
For 50 years, Wheeled Coach ambulances have served communities. On March 19, 2025, more than 100 customers, service partners, employees and community leaders attended a well-deserved appreciation ceremony at Wheeled Coach’s Winter Park, Florida, production facility.
Mark Van Arnam, president of the REV Ambulance Group, began the event ensuring that each of the partners that help make Wheeled Coach and REV Group the success it is were given the appropriate recognition and appreciation. While REV Group has operations in Ohio, California, and North Carolina, Wheeled Coach has called Orlando, Florida, home for over five decades.
Beginning with a small shop just outside of downtown, Robert Collins Sr. began building wheelchair-accommodating vans, along with Type II ambulances with a team of five people. Over the years, a greater demand for service caused the focus to shift to ambulance production with a change of style to Type I and Type III ambulances and a move to the company’s current location.
Today, more than 700 employees work between two complexes opposing each other on Forsyth Road with an efficient and effective process of chassis delivery, modification, fabrication, interior construction, painting, fitting, finishing, and quality control operations that produce one of the most well-known ambulances in the world.
Also presenting was Scott Barnes, one of Wheeled Coach’s best known team members, who has been with the company since its earliest days. After helping teach members of Starline Enterprises, a nearby ambulance manufacturer, the emergency medical technician (EMT) program, Collins recruited him to be a consultant for how ambulances needed to be constructed to better suit the paramedics and EMTs who used them.
Since then, advancements in ambulance efficiency, comfort, and safety have been progressively improving. Such features as improved roll-over and side-impact protection for caregivers with True-Form box construction, the Safe-Pass Safety System, the Per4Max care provider restraint system, Cool-Bar air-conditioning, and the unique corner-cap lights that make a Wheeled Coach ambulance easily recognizable among any Type I or Type III ambulance on the road.
In touring the facility to see production in full swing, it is no wonder how Wheeled Coach has been able to produce more than 50,000 ambulances since 1975, with units serving all over the world. From small islands such as Tinian and Guam, to the coldest of environments of the North and South Poles, Wheeled Coach units can be found in every state, in 27 different countries, and traveling behind anywhere the President of the United States travels.
Single-unit agencies and the largest ambulance service providers have Wheeled Coach units in their fleet, with the FDNY having its own production line of over 1,000 units.
These 50 years have helped shape an industry that puts the responder and patient first with a future that builds upon advancements in technology and service capability and identify why Wheeled Coach is trusted by the toughest.
About the Author
Walt Lewis, a firefighter since 1990, is an assistant chief for the Orlando (FL) Fire Department, overseeing operations on A Shift. He began his service as a volunteer, then later as a paid firefighter in a bedroom community fire department. In 1996, he joined Orlando and has been on some of the busiest units and in special operations. He has contributed to the State of Florida Live Fire Training Instructor curriculum, written articles for various publications including Fire Engineering, has presented locally and nationally on fire and US&R topics, is a charter member of the Orlando Fire Conference, and is also a founding F.O.O.L.
