rev up your engines, welcome to my Thursday video, where I answer a viewers
question with an entire video and today's question comes from John, and
John asks, hey I was looking at Volvos the other day and I noticed the
one being sold here in the United States was made in China what's up with that
yes well that's true, here's the history of Volvo to explain what's happened to
Volvo, now Volvo started making cars in Sweden in 1927 and they made
simple reliable cars in the 1960s an aunt of mine had a P 1800 those cute
little sports cars and she got a million miles out of hers, it had carburetors on
it it was simple, they were very reliable very simple car, a lot of people liked
them they were kind of a niche car and the Swedes had a very good system for
building the cars, most of the people in the factory were trained to do all the
different parts, so rather than put bolts on the wheel their entire life and being
bored out of their mind, they do one part of the car for a while and then the next
month they do another part, so they had a happy labor force that was really
motivated and they made really good simple cars, but then in 1985 they
started designing and making front-wheel drive cars, before this there were all
simple rear-wheel drive cars like a Model T Ford, simple technology that
worked great and they started to make them in a larger mass-produced situation
than they had before, so they're going to a new technology front-wheel drive and
building a lot more of them and they had quite a few problems, in the late 80s and
the mid and early 90s Volvo's had a lot of problems with their cars, the
automatic transmissions had problems, head gaskets were blowning because they
were going to a new engine design that was front-wheel drive and a new
transmission design that was front-wheel drive and that led Volvo to have a lot
of problems especially economically, so in 1999 Ford Motor Company bought Volvo
Ford Motor Company own Volvo from 1999 to 2010 and they shared some
technologies, but still it was pretty much a failure for Ford because in
2010 they sold it to Geely a Chinese company at a really low price they lost
money on a deal there's no arguing that, now
Geely is one of the smaller car manufacturers in China I believe they
are like 7th or 8th most popular or something like that, but they
decided to take a chance and buy Volvo so today there's three factories in
China that build Volvo's but only one factory in Sweden that builds Volvo's
and there's also an assembly plant in South Carolina that builds Volvo, they
don't do it from scratch, they put them together that's why it's called an
assembly plant, and I find that kind of amusing because years ago I bought this
Husqvarna chainsaw thinking, oh the Swedes really know how to make chain
saws, only to find out when I did the fine print did a little research this
chain saw it wasn't made in Sweden, it was made in South Carolina, so I guess
the Swedes or today the Chinese have a thing for either Southern women or a
warmer climate than where they come from in Sweden, now I do have to say this
Husqvarna that I bought that was made in South Carolina has worked perfectly fine
for years I've had no problems with it at all and if anything the quality that
I've seen in the Volvos that are make china, is the same or maybe even a little
better than the stuff that they were making it Sweden, but the Geely company
that owns Volvo they're doing big changes at Volvo
they are stressing the manufacture of three and four cylinder gasoline and
diesel engines and drop in the larger engine sizes and they recently announced
that Volvo as of 2019 are only going to be producing full electric vehicles or
hybrid electric vehicles like a Toyota Prius, so take that into consideration I
would not buy a new Volvo gas or diesel engine because they're not going to be
building them anymore and who knows what kind of upkeep they're gonna have on
parts and maintenance, because Volvo's arch competitors for a while at least
in Sweden was Saab and they went bankrupt years ago they had enough
problem with parts here in the United States being expensive and nobody could
figure out how to fix them, even when they were in existence, but now that Saab
is bankrupt don't go out and buy a Saab unless you want a lawn ornament, cuz you
can't get parts for them, hardly anybody's gonna work on them and they're very
complex cars and Volvo itself has always been a relatively high-tech car, so I'm
not saying they can't make the technology right, cuz in 2019 they're only
gonna make electric cars and hybrid cars they'll probably make really good ones
but as I talked about before, the infrastructure for electric cars is
still a long way away and hybrid cars are super complex and super expensive to
fix as they break down, I mean I got a lot of customers even today that don't buy Volvos
they lease them, so if you were thinking about that in the future maybe
you would lease an electric or hybrid Volvo car and then you wouldn't have any
long-term commitments for expensive repairs as they age, because throughout
their history, Volvo's have been pretty reliable cars
certainly for the first ten years or a hundred thousand miles of ownership so
if you're a leasing electric or hybrid car and it doesn't break while you're
leasing it what do you care and realize that the factories that are
making Volvo's in China are very new factories, you know they built them in
just the past few years and they're really high tech, their main problem is
finding good labor for them because the robots build most of it, so most of their
labor have to be trained engineers that can fix the robots and maintain them
while they're doing a 365 days a year 24 hours a day building of the cars, there's
no downtime with the machines but even the machines that build the machines are
gonna break down and need to reprogramming as time goes on
so now you know Volvo's are made in China, and since this is the Thursday
segment where I answer a viewers question, place your own question on the
YouTube comments below and I'll pick the best ones to make a single video to
answer your questions, and where else can you find a guy with 50 years experience
of fixing cars to answer your own question with a video, so if you never
want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell!