Introduction
Nowadays, there are many car producers competing in the car market. As a member of them, Volvo has been experiencing the whole car development since the early 1990s.
“Volvo Car Corporation, or Volvo Personvagnar AB, is a Swedish automobile manufacturer, owned by the Chinese Zhejiang Geely Holding Group. Volvo Car Corporation was founded in 1927, in Gothenburg, Sweden. Volvo was originally formed as a subsidiary company to the ball bearing maker SKF. When Volvo AB was introduced on the Swedish stock exchange in 1935, SKF sold most of the shares in the company. Volvo cars were owned by AB Volvo until 1999, when it was acquired by the Ford Motor Company as part of its Premier Automotive Group. Geely Holding Group then acquired Volvo from Ford in 2010.
Volvo Company was founded in 1927 in Gothenburg, Sweden, The Company was created as a subsidiary company 100% owned by SKF. Assar Gabrielsson was appointed the managing director and Gustav Larson as the technical manager.
The trademark Volvo, which is Latin for I roll, was first registered by SKF the 11 May 1915 with the intention to use it for a special series of ball bearing for the American market, but it was never used for this purpose. SKF trademark as it looks today was used instead for all the SKF-products. Some pre-series of Volvo-bearings stamped with the brand name Volvo were manufactured but was never released to the market and it was not until 1927 that the trademark was used again, now as a trademark and company name for an automobile
Volvo manufactures and markets a range of SUVs, station wagons, and sedans, compact executive sedans and coupes. With approximately 2,300 local dealers from around 100 national sales companies worldwide, Volvo Cars' largest markets are the United States, Sweden, China, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Belgium. In 2011, Volvo recorded global sales of 449,255 cars, an increase of 20.3% compared to 2010.
“Cars are driven by people. The guiding principle behind everything we make at Volvo, therefore, is and must remain, safety”, Assar Gabrielsson and Gustav Larson 1927” (Wikipedia).
Key Success Factors
Passive Safety
Safety has been the core value of Volvo since 1927. A series of pioneering safety innovations has made Volvo a world leader in automotive safety over the years. The Volvo founders stated that “safety is and must be the basic principle in all design work”.
“On Thursday August 13, 1959, the world's first car with standard-fit three-point safety belts-a Volvo PV544-was delivered to the Volvo dealer in the Swedish town of Kristianstad.
Over the next 50 years, the V-shaped three-point safety belt saved well over one million lives.
Feed out, stretch, click and pull taut. A simple movement of the hand and the belt is in place-at the same time as the risk of fatality or serious injury in a collision is cut by more than 50 percent”( Fowle, 2009).
The three-point safety belts are really important when the car accidents happen. Sometimes the impact of the crash can be much worse than expected. The impact of the crash can hurtle the driver or front passenger against the windshield of the car. Just about a month ago, there was driver being thrown out of the side window in a serious car accident. The impact of the crash was really violent. He did not put the safety belts on so that he could do nothing keep his body from being thrown out of the window. There were also some passengers being hurtled out of their seats and got hurt somehow because of not putting on the safety belts either.
Volvo has done a great job on developing the performance of safety since it was found. “Motor vehicle crashes in the United States result in more than 40,000 deaths per year,” says the Institute in the journal Injury Prevention” (Hitti, 2005).
However, if we carefully go over the detailed statistics, we can find out that the rate of vehicle deaths has been decreasing since 1980, although there were fluctuations over the thirty years
