Chinese Volvos

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Chinas-Geely-completes-apf-3344925305.html?x=0

Cholvo?

I probably just insulted someone in Mexico.

"a perennial money-loser in a country with strong labor unions."

Couldn't be any worse than the recent Failvos, er, Folvos (Ford Volvos)......could they?

Junkyard_Dog wrote: Couldn't be any worse than the recent Failvos, er, Folvos (Ford Volvos)......could they?

V50 is chock full of winsauce

but I agree, never underestimate Chinas ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory...and then execute the people responsible...and their Mothers...and their mothers houseplant

I briefly owned a '93 945T and I have a generally high opinion of the pre-850 Volvos. I suppose I might even have considered buying a new Volvo recently, even with Ford calling the shots, but there is absolutely no way I will ever consider buying a Volvo now.

"He said Volvo's biggest problem was high research and development costs while it produces far fewer vehicles than rivals Daimler AG and BMW AG." aka, future factory recalls. Hope not, but that sounds like throw out R&D, and pump those units out!! Look at the explosion in auto sales over the past 15 years. Used to be all bicycles in Beijing. Not now. And BUICK is a status symbol car over there..

Won't be long until China owns everything. I was is Sam's Club over the weekend and it seems like every product I picked up was made in China. Pretty sad.

I can haz Chinese 245, please?

Seriously. Can they put a new C30 into their Harbor Freight, sweatshop replicator and sell me the result at Manny, Moe and Jack's for $900?

The best part of the article for me was when they said Ford will drop Mercury at the end of the year. Talk about dead weight....

Mercury is a shoulda, coulda, woulda... if not for rebadging.

I think things in china and volvo are going to be interesting

1988RedT2 wrote: I briefly owned a '93 945T and I have a generally high opinion of the pre-850 Volvos. I suppose I might even have considered buying a new Volvo recently, even with Ford calling the shots, but there is absolutely no way I will ever consider buying a Volvo now.

Too bad my mother had Volvo, My aunt had volvo in early 70's got in bad wreck. Survived due it being Volvo. My mother and father meet due to my mothers Volvo since my father was dealer tech.

However I am not sure I want to buy a chinese car (putting the cash torward china). Hmm.... Buying used though.. I guess I have to keep this in mind.

I have no great hopes, but I sure wasn't optomistic when Ford bought Volvo either. I could just see the product managers in a meeting saying, "What do you mean we have to build parts for an 18 year old car? Ridiculous! Nobody complains when we discontinue door handles for 6 year old Explorers!" They didn't berkeley with the Volvo system much- in fact, most of their new sedans are based off the Volvo platform, since the 850 was brand new when Ford bought Volvo.

The Chinese can go one of two ways- they can lowball the crap outof it, and build a Volvo badged Geely, or they can look at the processes of a reasonably successful car company, and learn how to build a decent thing.

I'm not hopeful.

The Ford marriage was successful for Volvo, in that the S80 platform spawned a bunch of Fords and the XC90 (including the '07 my wife drives). Ford money helped to develop that platform because putting it under various Ford models led to the kind of volume cost savings that should have allowed Volvo to continue to compete. Geely's getting a lot of good, well developed technology and a couple really good platforms, and will likely immediately rob the best tech to go into Geely cars. Hopefully they don't just strip the technology and let the remains of Volvo die on the vine. Going forward, we'll just have to see how Geely goes, but it seems that far East ownership may not be all bad - nobody's complaining about the stuff that Malaysian-owned Lotus is putting out.

My hope is they do something about the dealer network - my local Volvo dealer is pitifully bad. I wanted to buy a CPO XC90 and gave a sales guy there 5 months to find me what I wanted, and he didn't do squat. I checked back a few times but it was pretty clear he had no interest in making a sale, so I bought out of town and flew out for the car I wanted. The service department has been similarly disinterested and borderline incompetent for the few things it's gone in under warranty for, so even though it's under warranty I'm not doing much with them if I can do it myself.