His description of the wagons of the 1960s seems to place all of the problems with American cars on the shoulders of station wagons:

American buyers first turned away from station wagons during the 1973 oil crisis. Their extreme length, emphasized by long rear overhangs to accommodate a third seat, made them natural targets.

Sorry, but almost all American cars were lengthy and heavy boats back then, not just wagons. There is nothing intrinsic to the wagon platform that says it needs to be the length of an aircraft carrier. That’s just what Detroit was making at the time.

He then speaks of the rise of the SUV as if it was a rational change for American buyers, while completely overlooking the fact that they have the same problems of poor fuel economy and extreme length that the cars of the 60′s did. He claims that they are “far more utilitarian” than wagons and offered “a lot more cargo space.”

There are many, often irrational, reasons Americans moved to SUVs, but the idea that wagons have less utility is ridiculous. I’ve got more space in the back of my brick than my buddy has in his Nissan Pathfinder. Yes, SUVs have 4-wheel drive, but that only contributes to their poor gas mileage and most drivers don’t need it anyway. AWD anyone?

As for Volvo, he sees their reputation for reliability as a problem, rather than a benefit:

Volvo probably did itself a disservice by running testimonials from owners who drove their Volvos for years and years. When you put a million miles or more on a car, it limits the opportunity for repeat business.

Yes, automakers shouldn’t tout longevity as an asset. They should just make cars that fall apart in 6 years so they can sell a new one. That’s what Detroit did, right? We can see how well that did for them.

Volvo VIN codes on Wikibooks

We know Volvo loves to crash their vehicles to demonstrate safety features, but in a recent demo the crash was truly an accident. To show off their Collision Avoidance™ system with Full Auto Brake™ technology, Volvo launched an equipped S60 toward a stationary truck at 20 mph, in front of press and video cameras. Unfortunately, the system failed and the car plowed into the bumper, destroying the front end of the vehicle and the careers of the people in Volvo’s PR and engineering departments.

So deadpan; so awesome.

via: Drive, Wired, TechNerd

Pictured above is Swedish deputy Prime Minister Maud Olofsson at yesterdays announcement of the sale of Volvo cars to the Chinese company Geely.

“Regardless of who owns Volvo Cars, its brand will still be Swedish.”

Unlike some Volvophiles, I couldn’t care less who owns the company. People are going to start hooting and hollering about this sale now that the rumors have been confirmed, but does it really matter? The important question is “Does the car suck or not?”

Critics, including Consumer Reports, have complained that the quality of Volvo cars has suffered since Ford purchased it in 1999. Is quality really going to get a whole lot worse now that it’s owned by Geely? Or is that just a xenophobic reaction about the supposed inferiority of Chinese workmanship?

Who defines a corporation’s product anyway? The nation that owns the company? The nation that originated the company? The nation where the cars are built? The nation where the cars are driven? Why is a Toyota that’s built in the US still a Japanese car, while a Volvo or Saab that’s owned by an American or Chinese company is still a Swedish car?

The idea of a nationally branded car is quaint. When Ford bought Volvo the brand ceased to “be Swedish,” whatever that means. It became just another commodity in a global marketplace that gets parts contracted out to companies all over the world but has the imprimatur of a corporate board and an aura constructed by the branding wizards of the marketing department.

According to a memo leaked to Jalopnik, the Volvo V70 will not be offered in North America after 2010. And while the V50 will still be available, its time may be numbered. That means the name “Volvo” may no longer be synonymous with “station wagon.”

I remember checking out the NY Auto show 4 or 5 years ago and being surprised that there was no V70 on display. I guess they had started the process of phasing it out back then. I was told that the XC70 was just like the V70, but, I’m sorry, it’s not. I don’t count the XC70 as a wagon, and Jalopnik agrees. However, Volvo execs feel that “the personality of the XC70 is a good fit for today’s lifestyles.” To which commenter chathamh responds:

If the current product lineup of most manufacturers was an accurate reflection of American lifestyles, most Americans would spend their free time fording creeks, hauling trailers, powering through snow drifts and traversing miles of unpaved mountain trails.

Today’s manufacturers, at least for cars in the US market, don’t understand that not everyone wants to have to choose between a vanilla mid-sized sedan and a blinged out monster truck. I’ve purchased 2 cars in my life, a 745t and my current 245. What brought me to Volvo wasn’t their “personality”. It was the fact that they made really nice station wagons, vehicles that had great carrying capacity, had a relatively low center of gravity and drove like cars. Europeans understand this. In my visits to Germany and France I’m always impressed that they had such beautiful, sleek wagons. They understand that you can increase carrying capacity without raising the vehicle sky-high, tacking on knobby tires and forcing the driver to sit upright. That’s why Volvo will still be making the V70 for the European market.

This news from Volvo goes hand-in-hand with what’s happened to Subaru’s once sexy Legacy wagon. They dropped it a few years ago in favor of the Outback, and then they converted the Outback into a bloated crossover SUV. Someone in my neighborhood just got one of these abominations and I shudder every time I walk by it. Doesn’t Subaru already litter our aesthetic landscape enough with the Tribeca? How is the Outback any different?

Jalopnik posted a heart-warming eulogy to the Volvo wagon, a historic look back at the rise and sudden fall of the iconic boxy brick. RIP.

PS. I hope to wake up tomorrow and find this was all a horrible nightmare. Or maybe I should just get a life, because I’m not in the market for a new car anyway, and I’ll probably drive my precious 245 into my grave!

The video below offers a glimpse of the Volvo assembly line in Kalmar, Sweden in the early 1970s as it produces the 200 series model. It’s an educational video demonstrating new factory production techniques pioneered by Volvo and offers an amazing glimpse at how Volvo was trying to humanize the assembly line and improve worker’s satisfaction with their jobs.

IPD posted the video on their site, and I did a little research to find more info on this particular plant and the rational behind Volvo’s new assembly line.

Volvo was attempting to alleviate some of the disconnect workers felt toward the cars they were building. By having a small team of workers work on one car at a time, rather than spreading them out on an assembly line, they hoped to build a more productive and engaged workforce. This was a fairly direct answer to Fordist specialized production and the Marxist theory of worker alienation:

In a nutshell Marx’s Theory of Alienation is the contention that in modern industrial production under capitalist conditions workers will inevitably lose control of their lives by losing control over their work. Workers thus cease to be autonomous beings in any significant sense. Under pre-capitalist conditions a blacksmith, e.g., or a shoemaker would own his own shop, set his own hours, determine his own working conditions, shape his own product, and have some say in how his product is bartered or sold. His relationships with the people with whom he worked and dealt had a more or less personal character.

Under the conditions of modern factory production, by contrast, the average worker is not much more than a replaceable cog in a gigantic and impersonal production apparatus. Where armies of hired operatives perform monotonous and closely supervised tasks, workers have essentially lost control over the process of production, over the products which they produce, and over the relationships they have with each other. As a consequence they have become estranged from their very human nature, which Marx understood to be free and productive activity.

For Volvo, their experiment was expected to produce healthier and more productive workers. According to the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society:

Operators… have low physical and timing demands, high psychological demands because of increased duties and high-decision latitude due to varied and complex skills utilized, the two latter characterizing active work. Operators at standard assembly lines have higher levels of physical and timing demands, lower levels of psychological demand, and lower control, characterizing high-strain work. Active work is related to lower incidence of heart disease than high-strain work.

Last year I experienced both side of this work paradigm, although it was in the field of web design. I worked as a designer for the websites of two different magazine companies, Hearst and Condé Nast. At Hearst I was part of a small team of designers producing graphics for thirteen different magazines, including Harper’s Bazaar and Cosmopolitan. Work requests came from editors rather anonymously through an internal ticketing system and there was often no interaction with anyone other than the other designers, who all had tasks which were quite different from mine. I found it quite stressful, and never caught the flow. I was fired after 2 months.

At Condé Nast, in contrast,  I was part of Portfolio Magazine’s online group. There I collaborated with web producers, marketing directors, traffic statisticians and programmers to bring out new products. We each had different strengths and worked directly together to focus on one on-line property. There was a greater kinship among my co-workers and closer engagement with the product. It also meant that we were better able to enjoy the success or failure of what we produced, since we were much closer to it.

While this utopian idea of collaborative teamwork sounds great in theory, apparently it didn’t do enough good for the bottom line. Many of us at Condé Nast were laid off in restructurings last year, Portfolio magazine was shut down, and management decided to absorb some of the tech workers into specialized teams, similar to Hearst. I was too new to have any staying power and was let go, along with many of my friends and collegues.

Volvo’s worker-democracy experiment didn’t pan out for the long-term either. They shut down their Kulmar and Uddevalla plants in 1992 and the auto division was purchased by Ford in 1999, tragically sucking them into the  symbolic originator of alienated production.

I like to think that the quality and longevity of 1980s Volvos has something to do with the new way the company produced cars and the collaboration of some of  its workers. The poor quality of American cars cranked out on assembly lines in the same era is a sharp contrast to our trusty bricks.

This Volvo “is aimed at the most demanding of customers: the independent woman in the premium segment.” So states the narrator for “YCC: Your Concept Car”, a look at creating an automobile specifically for women. Not to be confused with Rush “YYZ”, or F.U.B.U. “For Us By Us”, the YCC has such innovations as paint that is “just like a non-stick frying pan” and no easy access to the engine compartment. I assume this means that an independent woman in the “premium segment” couldn’t be bothered to know what’s going on with the car.

Over the soothing tones of new-age electronic jazz we learn it’s a “tough car” but not “brutal”. According to one of the women on the design team:

“You’re not buying a technical product; you’re buying by emotions.”

At :53 is my favorite part. A zoned out woman with a sweater casually draped around her shoulders wakes to tell us what our first impression of the car will be: “A feeling of, uh, grace… and, uh, space.” But she’s totally grace-less, speaking slowly and staring bug-eyed into the void.

VIA Sociological Images

BONUS: Trip out to the ambient music on this YCC promo video. Turn up the speakers for 9 minutes of hot buzz.

Back in 2004, thirty two people in the town of Dalaro, Sweden (population 1015) bought a new Volvo S40. On the exact same day. What caused the entire town to buy the same car, separately, on the same day? Viral marketing, of course.

The “Mystery of Dalaro” was directed by Spike Jonze for Volvo’s European ad agency. It “documents” the phenomenon of coincidental consumption in a cute way. I especially like the Carl Jung reference. Don’t know if it ended up selling more than 32 cars though.

Via the book OBD: Obsessive Branding Disorder

Truth About Cars has a great guest post from Stein X Leikanger documenting a marketing meeting during the continuing destruction of the “soul” of Saab under GM.

GM wanted Cross-Platform Synergies, and didn’t pay much attention to the individual brands. Just look at www.gm.com – I hate that place – they still think there is such a thing as a GM-car, at the expense of the individual brands, and they’re never going to abandon that mindset.

I wasn’t familiar with the “Saab versus…” ad campaign he mentions in the post, but a search for “Saab vs Volvo” pulls up this awesome clip from “Scorched Heat” of a 740t being chased by 900 series cop cars.