Volvo Determined To Prove "Made In China" Means Quality - Are Ready To Say The Same?

In contrast to its European factories that check a few completed cars from each batch, every vehicle that rolls off Volvo's 3-year-old assembly line in this city in China's southwest goes through a five-hour battery of tests on a driving track. Once a month, or three times as often as in Europe, Volvo tears apart a finished car in Chengdu to examine the quality of welds and other work.

The effort to persuade Americans to buy a premium car from China is a new step up in Volvo Car Corp.'s campaign to establish itself as a global luxury brand following its 2010 acquisition by Chinese automaker Geely.

 

TheSteve - 4/23/2015 5:52:32 PM

+1 Boost

I'm skeptical, but I've been wrong before.

Denon, the premium audio-visual component manufacturer, has moved the manufacturing of their lower-end components to China, and apparently hasn't suffered quality issues. But cars? We'll see.

MBguy - 4/23/2015 11:18:05 PM

+1 Boost

@Editor: Check the headline. There's a typo.

HughJass - 4/24/2015 1:20:36 PM

+2 Boost

Bad quality perhaps. Even when they were owned by Ford Volvo's sounded cheap when you started the engine.

I wonder which company Volvo's designers will start to rip off? I'm surprised their designs have stayed quite unique thus far which to me means they still employ the European designers for now.

TomM - 4/24/2015 9:11:49 PM

+1 Boost

It took decades for the actual lack of quality to result in Quality cars from Japan - and then a few more for people to actually equate Japanese cars with quality. At least one reason was that the initial Japanese offerings were really poor - and put them in a hole.

Korea is just now producing higher quality cars - after their first ones were questionable - and people still do not trust korean cars to be quality yet.

IF the first offerings from China mirror those two countries - with small - cheap -cars of dubious quality coming first - China will have a long road.