When my Swedish colleagues returned from their 1998 summer vacation period, I found myself working in the Marketing team for a new-car project intended to replace Volvo’s first-generation S40 and V40 compact sedans and station wagons.
With some naïve self-assurance born of more than twenty years of design, product planning, and marketing experience at Volvo’s Rockleigh, New Jersey U.S. headquarters, I was sure the Swedes would value my expertise.
After all, I had heard through the grapevine that Volvo’s home-based marketing group had comically struggled to produce an acceptable model designation scheme for their current compacts, first proposing S4 for the sedan and F4 (F for ‘flexibility’) for the station wagon? And hadn’t that idea been shot down by Audi, who were already offering their own S4 high-performance compact sedan? Then, Volvo proposed S40 and F40, respectively, to which Ferrari appropriately objected (not that there would have been much danger of customer confusion between that Ferrari hypercar and the Dutch-built five-door).
It’s easy to see how these two cars could be confused. They both have black trim around their taillights… (Sources: https://unsplash.com, Y. Zaugg (F40); Ron Kimball kimballstock (V40).
Finally, the S40 and V40 designations were proposed (V for ‘versatility’ and also the Swedish word vagn, which translates to ‘carriage’ in English). After meeting with no obvious disapproval from Volvo’s fellow automakers, the S40 and V40 model designations stuck, and I began working to develop marketing platforms for the upcoming models, at the same time as Volvo’s three design studios (then in Sweden, the Netherlands, and California) began submitting a wide range of directional styling proposals for the new cars.
This initial ideation included concepts as far afield as two-seat convertibles, off-road-inspired 4x4s, and sporty coupes, none of which seemed likely to move beyond the two-dimensional exploration stage. It was fascinating, however, to view the scope of creativity expressed by the three design studios at this early stage of the project. It was especially exciting for me to interact with the Swedish and Dutch designers when they made periodic presentations to the project team. More broadly speaking, I was grateful that Volvo had given me the opportunity to play even a small role in this complex process.
Not one of the early P1X concepts, but many of them would have pushed the boundaries of Volvo design even more than this later concept did. (Source: Volvo Cars Design, 2008)
I had hardly been embedded in Sweden for six months when the Volvo world changed dramatically. On January 27th, 1999, Ford Motor Company purchased Volvo Cars for $6.45 billion, making it a member of Ford’s developing Premier Automotive Group, a collection of mid-market and luxury brands with which the Dearborn automaker intended to broaden its market reach and profit potential among new, affluent customer groups it had not yet effectively targeted.
Volvo Cars’ Leif Johansson and Ford’s Jac Nasser strike a pose outside the Volvohallen exhibition center outside Volvo HQ. They don’t look happy; the sun must have been in their eyes. Volvohallen has now been replaced, as have those two CEOs. (Source: imsvintagephotos.com)
As an American ex-pat in Gothenburg, I was more aware than many of the external and internal reactions to the purchase. Not long afterward, while strolling down Avenyn, the city’s main entertainment district, I encountered folks wearing T-shirts emblazoned not with the familiar blue-oval “Ford” script, but with another, less friendly four-letter word also beginning with the letter F.
Understandably, fear of the unknown was also a contributing factor within the Volvo complex, but the prevailing mood among the stoic, pragmatic Swedes with whom I worked was one of keeping our collective heads down and working as usual. That’s not to say that there weren’t instances of what might be called malicious compliance, especially as Ford’s legions of finance personnel descended on southwest Sweden and inserted themselves and the Dearborn bureaucracy into our everyday working processes.
Shortly after the Ford purchase, I moved from my marketing-related spot to a position as the North American representative on the so-called P1X project. The internal designation that had been used for the stillborn Volvo/Mitsubishi project would remain, but the scope of our new-car project shifted dramatically. What was to have been an evolution of the Mitsubishi-Volvo compact car platform-sharing agreement instead became a troika, with Ford and Mazda our new partners in developing a shared, common C-segment new-car architecture.
One of the first priorities was to discern economies of scale that could be achieved among the new partners. This began with tear-downs of then-current Ford/Mazda/Volvo products offered in that market segment, as well as detailed comparisons of each brand’s engineering design requirements and analyses of their respective component cost structures.
Fortunately, as a marketing guy, I was not involved in that minutiae, but I was rudely reminded of the difficulties in such an exercise during a Gothenburg presentation by a Ford executive, who admitted that Dearborn found Volvo’s engineering requirements and costs to be completely unacceptable. For its part, Volvo confirmed that few if any of Ford’s C-car components or systems met its engineering standards.
In the end, the working group found that only a few HVAC parts could be profitably shared among the three brands, a sobering conclusion that undoubtedly led to some degree of compromise on everyone’s part for a family of vehicles intended for introduction in just over four years hence. (Again, according to the grapevine, after the results of this exercise were shared with Volvo Cars executive team, some thought was given to simply reviving the cooperation with Mitsubishi, but the die, so to speak, had already been cast.)
This shot probably exaggerates the number of common parts agreed upon by the Ford and Volvo engineering teams. (Source: www.google.com)
Back to the hundreds of initial styling concepts for new C-segment Volvos. How would they be narrowed down to a manageable level – and which ones would survive? We now know the answer to that last question, but more than a few spirited discussions would take place before their final production cadence would be set…
(Featured image from https://cabinsinsweden.com)
Hundreds of the old square Volvos still ply the streets of North Korea.
No parts available.
No factory trained techs needed.
Volvo shoulda coulda blah blah blah
Maybe they should buy Dodge
How fascinating. The clash of cultures made real, as it must when such take-overs happen. It’s true that Ford sold Volvo for just $1.8 billion in 2018 – and did they ever make $ from it, I wonder? – but can you imagine trying to manage it during integration with Ford?
As an example, I must say there’s zero evidence in the field that Volvo engineering was so superior to Ford’s (except perhaps for safety stuff). To wit, the really lovely-looking 1st-gen V/40 wasn’t too reliable, and certainly wasn’t much chop to drive: other Volvos weren’t exactly Japanese in reliability either, but then again, practically no-one is.
I’m interested to know the timeframe in which you were required (more or less) to learn Swedish. Not a tiny challenge, as it seems you weren’t exactly young on arrival there.
I had to fight with Volvo’s HR department to get my Swedish lessons approved. Their first reaction was along the lines of “You don’t need to learn Swedish – everyone here speaks English,” but I wanted to be able to master normal daily conversation and absorb as much of the culture as I could.
As I recall, the timeframe for my lessons was rather open-ended. After two or three months of two-hour weekly lessons, my teacher felt I’d learned enough to communicate effectively.
I have often wondered how and why Volvo quality declined significantly, even before the Ford merger. Volvo, Mercedes, and BMW all were significant users of Bosch electrics/electronics, and IIRC, all of them sufferred quality declines around the same time, and generally around their electrical reliability. Could the reason ultimately be traced to Bosch, and not the individual manufacturers. This is all long in the past, obviously, so my memory of timelines is faulty. But could Bosch have been the Lucas of the 1990’s/2000’s?
I had pretty much forgotten about the PAG within the FoMoCo family. It was not one of their better ideas.
But look at the bright side: you had wanted to work for Ford when you were starting out, and you eventually got there. But not in a way you might have expected.
JPC,
That’s an astute observation. I never mentally connected those dots, but you’re right. Twenty-five years after my Ford-sponsored Art Center design project, I found myself working for the company, in effect.
My Swedish work assignment was one of the highlights of my career with Volvo.
“I had pretty much forgotten about the PAG within the FoMoCo family. It was not one of their better ideas.”
In my opinion, PAG wasn’t a bad idea. Ford could have positioned itself as broadly as the VW Group did.
Ford and Mazda for base mtorisation (one of the two brands with a low-end tendency).
Volvo and Jaguar as brands for executive cars, with Jaguar having a clear tendency towards luxury.
And finally Aston Martin for the absolute high-end luxury segment.
It’s a shame that nothing came of it
Fascinating – I’ve been involved in joint projects as a designer where common parts have to be agreed on and can confirm that this is a fun process (not). Sometimes it works out fine though, as in the GM/Renault co-operation on the X83 Trafic/Vivaro.
Can’t wait to read the next installment!
I too find these details, looking behind the curtain so to speak, fascinating .
I didn’t realize Ford didn’t make and $ via Volvo and sold it on at a dead loss .
As far as coulda shoulda woulda, the fact remains that Vovlo’s market share and profitability are what drove this mashup .
-Nate
PAG: Wolfgang Reitzle’s great ambition, a springboard to even greater things. I found it hard to look at his face in pictures; it so clearly showed his profound self-regard.
It was not a surprise to read just now at his Wikipedia page that he’s a major investor in a startup (Tomorrowlabs) that claims to have developed a compound to regenerate hair and skin. How utterly perfect!
How do you say “Voilà” in Swedish? How do you say “Whoot, there it is!”?
So Volvo sells their car business to Ford in part to purchase Renault’s commercial vehicle operations, which included Mack Trucks. Ironic that what a lot of people working for Volvo Cars went through when Ford took them over was mirrored by Mack people when Volvo took Mack over.
Reitzle had nothing on Jac Nassar.
Given that the P2 platform Ford acquired was used to develop the D4 platform that underpinned the 2010 to 2019 Explorer, did Ford really lose money here?