Biography|Filip Van Hool — The 2005 Morning He Showed the Press Tom Boonen's Team Coach Here

In 2005 Filip Van Hool called the press to the plant in Koningshooikt.

He was not yet chief executive. He was already the face the company put in front of cameras.

The exhibit was a coach built for Tom Boonen's Quick-Step team: a shower cabin, a massage corner, a rolling hotel for a world champion's season.

Boonen had won the Tour of Flanders that April. A factory in Lier putting his name on a custom coach was not a small local story.

Custom coaches were the plant's argument. Premier League clubs, touring bands, and orchestras bought the same idea in Europe and the United States.

Flemish papers later wrote that Steve Jobs ordered a Koningshooikt coach for Apple engineers' California commute and bargained options with Filip in person.

That Jobs story sits in local portrait reporting from March 2024, not in a dated Apple filing. Treat it as press tradition, not a contract excerpt.

The 2005 showing itself is solid. It is the moment the third generation stood on the factory floor and sold a finished bus as a public object.

The coach was advertising in steel. The parking lot on Bernard Van Hoolstraat was the showroom.

Filip had been on the executive team since 1999, running Bus and Car operations from this site.

Two years later he would join the board. Eight years later the board would make him chief executive.

The halls behind the street were still a family factory then. They are not, under the same ownership, today.

Photo: Bert76, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons