THIS DAY IN HISTORY Oct 20, 1965: Last Volvo PV rolls off the assembly line At 3 p.m. on October 20, 1965, the very last PV-series Volvo drives off the assembly line in Lundby, Sweden. The car, a zippy black Sport PV544 with red interior trim, went straight to the Volvo Museum in Gothenburg. PV-series Volvos had been in production, first as the PV444 and then as the PV544, since 1947 and 440,000 sold in all. By the end of its run, the PV was old-fashioned–looking—the company had made very few cosmetic changes in the two decades the car had been on the market—but it remained a good, solid automobile. Above all, Road & Track magazine said in 1963, the Volvo PV544 is such a practical car. Volvos most attractive appeal lies in its solidity and its quality in every single respect. There is nothing slapdash or under-dimensioned about any part of the car and that is more than enough to compensate for any perceived lack of glamour. Volvo (the companys name is Latin for I roll) was founded in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1927 and quickly won a reputation for building sturdy, safe cars. After World War II, the company unveiled the PV444—between 1947 and 1958 it sold more than 200,000 of the diminutive cars—and it introduced the PV544 in August 1958. The two cars were virtually identical—both were slightly humpbacked and dowdy—except that the PV544 had a one-piece windshield in place of the PV444s divided one, a larger rear window and a bigger flip-out side windows, all of which brightened up the cars interior considerably. Neither model ever had four doors, right-hand drive or an interior clock. Despite the cars anachronistic appearance, people loved them. A PV Volvo might have looked stodgy, but it did not drive it: it could go from zero to 60 mph in 13 seconds, could cruise comfortably at 70 mph and got 27 miles per gallon on the highway. The PVs were great family cars but they were also powerful, sturdy racers: In 1965, for example, Kenyan brothers Joginder and Jaswant Singh won one of the toughest road races in the world, the 3,000-mile East African Safari rally, in their 1964 PV544. (Among other things, drivers in the safari had to negotiate falling boulders, mud puddles, errant herds of buffalo and giraffes blocking the road.) Of the 440,000 PVs built, 280,000 stayed in Sweden. Most of the rest were exported to other European countries. In 1966, in place of the PV-series cars, the company introduced the 144 sedan, the car that is the ancestor of the boxy Volvos seen today.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 13:00:15 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015