Chinese to Buy Volvo?
When Kirk Kekorian's mouthpiece Jerry York said Ford should get rid of Volvo,few commentators thought the deal would go down this quickly. Even though a Ford spokesman insists "we have been consistently saying since the end of last year that Volvo is not for sale," Automotive News [sub] reports that Ford is negotiating with Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC) to sell their Swedish division. SAIC currently has joint ventures with GM and VW to build and sell cars in China. They also own the rights to Rover; they're branching out with their own vehicles based on Rover cars under the Roewe brand. Buying Volvo would give SAIC a strong inroad to the European and American markets and/or another brand to play with in China. If this deal falls through, an unnamed Russian investor is rumored to be interested in buying Volvo. A word of caution to the brand's suitors: Gott lära av andras fel, eftersom man inte hinner begå alla själv.
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Maybe they can reduce the fantastic price of the XC70. While they're at it, maybe they can make it fuel efficient. Nice short, otherwise.
Every major player has huge manufacturing base in China especially those German brands. Congrats to all my friends who's riding latest model of BMW/Benz. You got a lot of stuff coming from the same source as WalMart.There's a little dirty rumor spreading for a while that many components with big "made in German" printings are literally packed and shipped from China. Guess what ? You'll never tell. I heard Volvo is one of the rare cases that none of their parts are from China. Now if SAIC win the bid, the only cars you can get without Chinese components may reduced to ... panthers ?
Bad News PLZwiseup ..... those wonderful P1 platform cars (S40 V50 C30 C70) are full of parts made in China as are the new P3 cars (S80 XC70 V70 and soon XC60). As a Volvo tech I can tell you that I see these come in on the hook or driven in everyday with electrical problems that were non-exsistant in the P2 platform. Many had component failure during the PDI process although some of those were resolved in '05-'06. Sill the component failure rate far exceeds any P2 car. We now get brake rotors that say on the box 'Made in China' but the plastic packaging says 'Made in Sweden' ... go figure. Volvo already has a plant in China for the P1 platform although they says it's only for the Chinese market I would tend to disagree after watching the product quality decline since mid '04 just before the launch of the P1 line (2004.5). MasterTech
Two years passed, Ford was still hesitant. China buyer was the last one to take Volvo in the pocket. Chinese did very good on weapon and aerospace, to maintain a quality car will not be a issue. World is always changing, I still remember how British look down the Germany goods, and force them to mark "made in German" on everything. Same happen to Japanese when they export car to US. Be patient.