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MATT GENTRY | The Roanoke Times A Volvo truck with its iconic diagonal grill slash drives past the Volvo New River Valley Plant in Dublin Tuesday. Volvo Trucks' Dublin plant will lay off 734 employees in February. DUBLIN - Those in and around Pulaski County's Volvo truck plant, one of the largest employers in Western Virginia, were coming to terms Tuesday with another announcement of a mass layoff. Volvo will lay off 734 production employees over a three-week period in February, news that county officials first learned after a notice the company filed Tuesday. That represents a quarter of...

Volvo has a vision about rubbish. They want to replace bin collectors with autonomous robots, and they want to do it by summer 2016. (snip) The drones will accompany a dustcart, itself developed by another partner, the recycling company Renova, with a single driver who would sit, clean and at ease, in his or her cab as the robots do the dirty heavy lifting. The driver would not have direct control over the drones, but would act as their supervisor. (snip) The image that accompanies the announcement of the project shows robots that look like a cross between a Segway...

Volvo's choice of right-to-work state South Carolina for its $500 million assembly plant puts the Swedish car maker on a collision course with the United Auto Workers, but Gov. Nikki Haley predicts the union will be the latest labor organization to find itself unwelcome in the Palmetto State. The company announced last week plans for its first facility in North America, a plant that will employ up to 2,000 workers and turn out 100,000 cars per year. Haley, an outspoken critic of unions, has made it clear the union is unwelcome, but United Auto Workers President Dennis Williams said his...

Rep. John Delaney was in Hagerstown Wednesday to pitch his proposal for long-term funding of transportation and other infrastructure projects by repatriating the overseas earnings of American corporations. "There hasn't been anything really transformative to put a lot of money into infrastructure," Delaney, D-Md., told a small group of businesspeople at Bulls & Bears restaurant. He pointed out that the federal gas tax — the primary source of revenue for the Highway Trust Fund — has not been increased since the early 1990s, in part, because it is politically unpopular. It also is a regressive tax that hits lower-income people...

Another foreign automaker plans to create American jobs by making cars in the United States. Volvo said Monday that it will build a new manufacturing plant in South Carolina. Located in Berkeley County, it is expected to create 2,000 new jobs over the next decade, and up to 4,000 jobs by 2030. Construction will begin later this year and Volvo expects to begin rolling out cars from the factory in 2018. Volvo, which was bought by the Chinese automaker Geely Holding Group in 2010 from Ford Motor (F), makes cars in Sweden, Belgium and China. It first announced plans to...

Sweden's Volvo has chosen a site in South Carolina for a $500 million investment in its first U.S. plant, it said on Monday, targeting a bigger share of the increasingly competitive North American premium market. Work will begin this year on the factory in Berkeley County, with production due to start in 2018 and quickly reach 100,000 vehicles a year.

Each year, 24/7 Wall St. identifies 10 important brands sold in America that we predict will disappear before 2014. This year’s list reflects the brutally competitive nature of certain industries and the importance of not falling behind in efficiency, innovation or financing. The list also reflects how industry trends can accelerate the demise of certain brands. This year, we included two magazines — Martha Stewart Living and Road & Track. With print advertising in a multiyear decline, some magazines have weathered the decline better than others. These two, however, have suffered sharp drops in advertising revenue over the past five...

BEIJING (Reuters) - Volvo Car Group plans to export a Chinese-made midsize sedan this year to the United States, and is starting to weigh the possibility of building a vehicle factory in the United States, people familiar with the Chinese-owned automaker’s plans said. Both moves would be significant for the auto industry and Volvo’s parent, Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co [GEELY.UL]. So far, global automakers have chosen not to ship vehicles made in China to the U.S. market in any significant numbers, and efforts by Chinese automakers to export vehicles to the United States have foundered. Volvo is also behind...

North Korea Owes Sweden €300m for 1,000 Volvos It Stole 40 Years Ago - And Is Still Using By John Ericson / August 29, 2014 6:43 AM EDT North Korea’s foremost trade debt to the western world is bizarre even by North Korean standards. Each time the administration misses a payment, as it has done every year for the past 40 years, we are reminded of one of the most unexpected political twists of the last century: Kim Il-sung scamming Sweden out of 1,000 Volvo 144 sedans. It is a story that is just as strange as it sounds –...

When we ran a story a while back about the cars of North Korea, one photo in particular caught my eye. In that photo was a green 1974 Volvo 144, which made me wonder if it was part of those 1000 legendary stolen Volvos I’d heard rumors about. It was, because those rumors are true. It’s around the 40th anniversary of one of the greatest state-sponsored mass carjackings in history, a fact that Newsweek commemorated with an article last week. That article stated that the total amount owed for those thousand Volvos is now up to €300 million ($393 million...

Don't know 'bout the rest of ya, but as a Swede and Volvo owner, I pretty much trust this company to experiment some.. (Link to clip below)

Honda may have been the first OEM to bring Chinese-made cars to North America, but their Made-In-China Fit never arrived in the United States. Now, it looks like Volvo will be the first brand to import Chinese-made cars to America. Reuters is reporting that Volvo will import the S60L (for long wheelbase) sedan to the United States, with volumes of around 10,000 units per year. The S60L is identical to the S60, save for a 3.1 inch longer wheelbase, for enhanced rear seat comfort. Volvo did not confirm which models will actually come to the United States, but a Volvo...

Soviet Sweden? Model Nation Sliding to Third World By Dale Hurd CBN News Sr. Reporter Wednesday, April 02, 2014 STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- When President Barack Obama visited Sweden last year, he expressed his deep admiration for the Swedish model. But that should make Americans a little nervous. One U.N. report says Sweden will be a third-world nation in about 15 years, below Libya and Bulgaria. Sweden is a society that believes it is racing into the future, but critics warn that it is racing to the bottom. It has been a laboratory for all kinds of social experiments: Swedish leaders...

ITHACA, N.Y. -- A motorist who pulled into an Ithaca parking lot when he got lost this morning told police he had his vehicle carjacked at gunpoint. The victim said he pulled into the parking lot in the 200 block of West State Street shortly before 2 a.m. when a woman appeared at the driver's side window of his SUV and pointed a handgun at him, Ithaca police said. The woman had gotten the victim's attention by knocking on his window with what he believed was the gun, although he was not looking up at the time, police Officer Jamie...

This is a Volvo truck commercial with Jean Claude Van Damme. I find it amazing. Volvo Trucks - The Epic Split feat. Van Damme (Live Test 6)

NEW YORK, - A New York state man told NBC's "Today" show in New York he has driven his 1966 Volvo P1800 a record 3 million miles. Irv Gordon, 74, a retired teacher, appeared on the program in 2002 to show off his red Volvo, which he had driven a Guinness World Record-setting 2 million miles -- and he returned to "Today" Tuesday to show how he had put another million miles on the car since his last appearance. Gordon first achieved the world record for most miles driven by a single person in a non-commercial vehicle at 1.69 million...

SANTA MONICA (CBSLA.com) — Volvo has unveiled a new cutting-edge device that automatically slams the brakes of a car when it spots and identifies pedestrians and cyclists in its pathway. The high-definition cameras, which are located in the rear-view mirror and the car’s radar, first sends the driver warning lights and sounds when a person or bicyclist comes too close to the vehicle. If the driver fails to react, that’s when the car will then come to a stop. “Volvo has always been the leader in safety. They invented the three-point safety belt back in the 1950s. Take that forward...

It just keeps going, and going, and going. No, it's not a battery. It's Irvin Gordon's 1966 Volvo P1800S. Gordon's small, red two-door has well more than 2 million miles on the odometer, the equivalent of nearly 1,176 times across the globe. The retired schoolteacher from Long Island hopes to reach the 3 million mile mark by next year. He only has 34,000 miles to go. The 72-year-old Gordon drives his Volvo everywhere. He has held the Guinness World Records mark for High Mileage Vehicle since 2002 and was the first person to hold that record. "It's just a car...

Volvo has come out with the world's first commercial airbag designed to protect pedestrians rather than drivers in a car accident. That's just one of many smart safety features on display in its latest model of the Volvo V40 compact car. The pedestrian airbag inflates across one-third of the windshield and raises the back of the car hood as soon as the bumper detects a collision with a person. Such technology could cut down on lethal encounters between humans and cars that lead to U.S. pedestrians making up 12 percent of all traffic fatalities —

In one word; marketing skills. No one actually needs French perfumes. Fancy a rum and cola? - Why bother about coke? This Christmas, I and my brother, a programmer (silly job, good pay), discussed the issue of how to define a 'smart phone'. I'm a simple cook, but my Sony Ericsson Vivaz can do everything his iPhone could do, however, at the end of the row, we both agreed Apple and their products are among the best marketed brands on Earth. IKEA is another example of companies that are more than companies. Everyone has experienced sad misfortunes with IKEA furniture....