Volvo recreation marks 85 years

Volvo's first car drives out of the factory gates in 1927, then repeats the same exercise in 2012.
Neil Dowling

Contributing Journalist

2 min read

A long 85 years of fashion, fads and colour photography separates the historic drive through the factory gates of Volvo's first car. Celebrating Volvo's birthday this week is a recreation of the first car's first metres from obscurity and onto a Swedish icon that now sells almost 500,000 cars a year.

Volvo, Latin for "I roll'', sold 280 cars in its first year. The effort is more remarkable given the company founders, Assar Gabrielsson and Gustaf Larson, had no direct experience of cars or the automotive industry.

The company was initially funded by Swedish ball-bearing maker SKF who sold its share in 1935. Volvo's first mass-produced car, the 6V4 - but dubbed "Jakob" - rolled off the production line at the Lundby factory in Gothenburg, Sweden on April 14, 1927.

It was driven by then Volvo sales manager Hilmer Johansson and 85 years later, the same car was piloted by Volvo Car president and CEO, Stefan Jacoby with Volvo Group president Olof Persson as passenger.

The Volvo Group - which sold its car business to Ford in 1999 for about $6.5 billion - is the world's second-biggest manufacturer of heavy trucks and is Sweden's biggest company.

It produces trucks under the Volvo, Renault Trucks, Mack and UD Trucks brands, and makes buses, construction equipment, drive systems for marine and industrial applications and components for aircraft engines. Ford sold Volvo in 2010 to Chinese group Geely for $1.8 billion.

Neil Dowling

Contributing Journalist

GoAutoMedia Cars have been the corner stone to Neil’s passion, beginning at pre-school age, through school but then pushed sideways while he studied accounting. It was rekindled when he started contributing to magazines including Bushdriver and then when he started a motoring section in Perth’s The Western Mail. He was then appointed as a finance writer for the evening Daily News, supplemented by writing its motoring column. He moved to The Sunday Times as finance editor and after a nine-year term, finally drove back into motoring when in 1998 he was asked to rebrand and restyle the newspaper’s motoring section, expanding it over 12 years from a two-page section to a 36-page lift-out. In 2010 he was selected to join News Ltd’s national motoring group Carsguide and covered national and international events, launches, news conferences and Car of the Year awards until November 2014 when he moved into freelancing, working for GoAuto, The West Australian, Western 4WDriver magazine, Bauer Media and as an online content writer for one of Australia’s biggest car groups. He has involved himself in all aspects including motorsport where he has competed in everything from motocross to motorkhanas and rallies including Targa West and the ARC Forest Rally. He loves all facets of the car industry, from design, manufacture, testing, marketing and even business structures and believes cars are one of the few high-volume consumables to combine a very high degree of engineering enlivened with an even higher degree of emotion from its consumers.
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