Contender/Encore[]
Contender was never a body type. Contender is a brand label that Pierce had attached to all its apparatus built using commercial truck chassis. That morphed into the use of Contender as the name for their budget custom chassis (based on the Saber) from 1999 to 2010, it was also used to label a large variety of trucks that were spec built in mass quantities and sold stock at dealerships.
The Encore is a process that Pierce uses to build walk-around rescue trucks. It uses standardized pre-fabricated modules of 4 sizes. This speeds up production.
It is not mutually exclusive for a truck to be both a Contender and an Encore. Trucks built using the Encore process are not labelled Encore.
The truck in question, a 2011 Freightliner M2 106MD Conventional Chassis, SN#23557, WO#12011902, was delivered to the customer, the City of Newark, Feb. 14, 2011. The body is listed as an ENCORE, Rescue, Aluminium. This data is available on pierceparts.com
Use of "van"[]
The Chevrolet Express is a van, it is and always has been a van. Not a sedan, not a truck. Adding van to every description for an Express is the same as adding pickup to every Ford F-series, Ram and Chevrolet 1500, 2500, 3500, 4500 and 5500. Neither is Custom added after every custom fire truck cab/chassis. That isn't done on the wiki. There are many chassis that do not include the type of chassis, as that is inferred from the model number/name.Gus2001 (talk) 23:58, 16 December 2022 (UTC)