Ford – Volvo Divorce in the Works?

When Ford acquired Volvo a few years ago, I thought it was quite a mismatch of corporate cultures. Volvo had a reputation for building the world’s safest cars.  Ford, on the other hand, sometimes seemed only slightly ahead of Yugo in that regard. 

I have owned Volvos for 20 years.  I bought the first one, a 240 DL wagon when our first child was an infant.  She now drives an S40 while I drive an S80 with about 120,000 miles on the odometer.  My wife and son drive other models, but not Fords. 

The safety reputation of Volvo is impeccable.  In the past 20 years, I have become aware of fatalities in Volvos only in a couple of types of situations — where a deer or a falling oak tree came through the windshield, or where a drunk wrapped himself around a utility pole at 100 mph.

Ford is another story altogether.  I won’t begin to catalog the horror stories.  Some I’m not at liberty to tell.

However, hope breathes eternal, and I hoped that Volvo’s influence might be a healthy one in the Ford corporate family.  But now it appears that the marriage didn’t work out, as Ford prepares to sell  its high-end European brands — Volvo, Land Rover, Aston Martin and Jaguar.  Ironically, Volvo ranks as one of Ford’s best-selling brands. It has generated profits of $800 million to $1 billion a year, provided Ford with expertise in safety development.  That’s just not enough to offset the losses from other Ford brands.

I wonder what had happened if Ford had subsumed itself into the Volvo identity, including the Volvo tradition of safety consciousness, and adopted Volvo safety technology for all its brands.  Just a thought.

The Shigley Law Firm  represents plaintiffs in wrongful death and catastrophic injury cases statewide in Georgia, and in other states subject to the multijurisdictional practice and pro hac vice rules in each state. Ken Shigley was designated as a “SuperLawyer” in Atlanta Magazine and one of the “Legal Elite” in Georgia Trend Magazine. He is a Certified Civil Trial Advocate of the National Board of Trial Advocacy, Chair of the Southeastern Motor Carrier Liability Institute and former chair of the Georgia Insurance Law Institute. He particularly focuses on cases arising from truck wrecks and accidents (tractor trailers truck wrecks, semi truck wrecks,18 wheeler truck wrecks, big rig truck wrecks, log truck wrecks, dump truck wrecks.