Volvo Could Be Buying Polestar To Exit Motorsport

@Hummer Volvo has one thing going in its favor: the ability to bestow Prius-like, and perhaps Tesla-like, eco cred on a collection of owners, former owners and future owners who want to feel like they are driving ecologically sound vehicles that can also outperform most of the other vehicles in their class. The fact that this may not in fact be true, but rather might only be an image projected upon those oh-so-trendy and oh-so-PC-correct Volvo owners, past, present and future, is all that is required to keep them as a captive audience.s And they will be able to humblebrag that their new Volvos will be faster than Prium and more eco-friendly than Teslae. (Those are my plurals, and I'm sticking to them.) And like lambs to the slaughter, Volvo will build them, with large dollops of panache and hollow engineering imagery, and the sheep will enter the pasture. This was the nature of the typical Volvo owner in the 80's, and it will be that demographic that Volvo will be hoping to corral with a sporty/eco image. Though the irony will probably be that an EcoBoost Mustang will probably be able to outperform their new offerings in all the major domains: eco, performance, and cost. I could be wrong, but watch this space and see what happens in the next two years. This will not be a Volvo deathwatch...it will be a Volvo sheep-shearing contest, one which could well run for years. And in the end, this could be the way that Volvo will most help Ford, as a way to steer all the remaining sheep and not-so-sheep towards a more honest car (except for the fake exhaust note!) than the Volvo shell game that passes for engineering. Laissez le bontemps Volvos roulez! PT Barnum would be delighted to see his ideas affirmed in the real world once more. And Volvo will be able to introduce new types of snake oil galore, with all that R&D plus a pseudo-halo emanating from Sweden. Yeah, hey, a true liberal's eco-performance toy, one to be proudly flaunted to friends and enemies alike. That is what Volvo has going in its favor. And while it may all be smoke and mirrors, the faithful will stay the price to be able to enter into, and travel along, the green highways of the Emerald City of Volvodom, or was that supposed to be Volvo-dumb? I always get confused when I try to explain why otherwise rational and successful individuals think that their new Volvo is the 21st century equivalent of that old 240 they know of a quarter to a half a century ago, that ran and ran forever, compared to the 60K-100K shelf life cars the rest of the world was turning out back then. Those days are dead and gone, except in the minds of the Volvo faithful. And they still exist, and still have money to burn in demonstrating their commitment to those monuments to their gullible following of supposed eco & performance vehicles. It is sort of like the kind of people who think that they are getting more than a large cup of coffee when they pay $5 for a veinte, when in reality, as Jackie Mason correctly noted, "It is NOT dark roasted! The coffee is BURNT!" And the Volvo is not an engineering marvel, it is a marvel that they can call that engineering. The last two really good, honest Volvos that were made were the 240 and the P1800. All else has been too much for too little for too long, protected by a false image of Swedish social cooperation in the effective manufacturing of supposedly low cost cars, relative to the supposed value that they delivered. If you ask me nicely, I'll tell you how I really feel about Volvo in my next post. In the meantime, you'll have to get by with just my elevator speech on why "not Volvo", a/k/a "Take the Volvo...PLEASE!".