The holding company (Tollgate Group) of Golden Arrow Bus Services (Pty) Ltd's predecessor, City Tramways, experienced financial problems in 1990. The management team acquired the bus company from the liquidator and started operating as Golden Arrow on the 1st of April 1992. The name Golden Arrow stems from the private company that had taken over Cape Electric Tramways in 1956. Later Golden Arrow was acquired by Hosken Consolidated Investment (HCI) Group and became a BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) company.
Golden Arrow currently operates over 1,000 buses during rush hour. The fleet has been thoroughly modernized and standardized since 2000, with over 800 MAN buses put into service. Most are standard MAN Explorer high floor buses but there are also some modern city buses with a lower floor (series 2500 and 2800) and articulated buses (series 2600). A small series of 10 Volvo's was bought for testing and the remainder of the fleet is made up of older buses, many of which were rebodied by Multimech in the period 1997-2006. The buses originating with City Tramways and the Empangani and PUTCO buses taken over in 1995-2000 form a varied group with often many differences within the series. In addition many buses were rebodied by Multimech, City Tramways'/Golden Arrow's in-house bus builder.
Golden Arrow's livery was orange and yellow since 1992. End of the 1990's buses for the Waterfront service (seen midibuses series 2300, bus 2033 and the 960-series) were in a dedicated white-blue livery. With the introduction of the new 2400-series buses end of the decade a new livery with white, green and orange was introduced. Golden Arrow is, since 2013, also one of the operating companies of MyCiTi with its subsidiary Table Bay Rapid Transit (TBRT) (see MyCiTi page). Another associated company is Sibanye (see seperate page). 

Fleet info up to 2006: Johnson, Andrew G., Golden Arrow. The PSV Circle, 2007 (http://www.psv-circle.org.uk/). See this publication for details on the fleet!