Cars from Sweden have always had a reputation for being solid cars. In addition to the original Saab aircraft factory, the Nordic cars owe this fame mainly to Volvo, which produced the first car 95 years ago, on April 14, 1927.
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Volvo ÖV 4 in production
Photo: Volvo
The company, whose name means “I’m turning around” in Latin, was established 12 years earlier as a subsidiary of the well-known bearing manufacturer Svenska Kullager Fabriken (SKF). However, she was only brought to life by two engineers who decided to design a purely Swedish car in the mid-1920s. Assar Gabrielsson and Gustaf Larson also got the production hall into the beginning, and already in June 1926 a prototype car was born.
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The car marked ÖV 4, which did not hide inspiration from American models, but was not the right one for the harsh Nordic climate. Mainly because it was a phaeton, a car with an open body and a canvas roof. In addition, the two-liter four-cylinder with 28 horsepower was not very strong.
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In the summer of 1927, the first Volvo with a closed body appeared, the PV 4 type. Both types sold less than a thousand in two years.
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The new carmaker was definitely established at the very end of the 1920s, when the PV 651 model appeared. The six-cylinder under its hood gave 55 horsepower, and the carmaker used this successful engine (with modifications) until the end of the 1950s.
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As early as 1928, Volvo introduced the first truck, and thanks to the production of trucks and buses, the company was already stable in the 1930s.
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Volvo cars are currently manufactured by Volvo Cars, which is majority owned by the Chinese company Geely Holding. Geely bought the carmaker in 2010 from the American Ford Motor Group. Ford took over Volvo Cars in 1999 from the Swedish Volvo Group, which now focuses on truck production.
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Volvo Cars currently produces around 800,000 cars a year. It has two plants in Europe, Sweden and Belgium. Last November, it announced that it wanted to build a third factory in Europe by the middle of this decade.
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