Rick,
Beg to differ, here. The following comes from the website of the P1800
club of Sweden:
"The problems were not yet over. Disagreements about the quality of the
car made Volvo to place members of its own staff stationary in the Jensen
plant to supervise the assembly of the car. The low quality of the
assembly and lacquer work gave Volvo a bad reputation. When Volvos new
car plant was ready in 1963, space was provided for the P1800 in the old
Lundby plant. The agreement with Jensen was solved by compensation. When
6 000 cars were built [the contract was originally for 10,000], the
production was transferred to Gothenburg. The cars got the suffix S
that stands for made in Sweden."
This is not to say that Jensen always built poor quality cars. On the
contrary, Jensen built some very fine cars. The Interceptor is as solid
a vehicle as you will ever find. It had to be to handle the Chrysler 440
(not Austin) running gear. The downside is that all the panels were
welded on-- expensive to fix if you ever pranged it.
Jensen also built the Sunbeam Tiger bodies under contract.
David Littlefield
1962 MGA MkII
1974 MG Midget vintage racecar
1951 MGTD
1961 Jaguar E-Type OTS
On Sun, 25 May 2003 10:23:00 -0700 rfeibusch1@earthlink.net (Richard
Feibusch) writes:
> RE: Volvo P1800
>
> Actually the build quality was not the reason that Volvo brought
> production
> home to Sweden, They had not originally considered that the car
> would be as
> popular as it became and figured that a low production model could
> be more
> economically built by a proven low-production builder.
>
> Jensen had a long history of building bodies and doing final
> assenbly.
> Before WWII, Jensen made mid priced, high performance sports cars
> with
> American Ford V8 chassis and I've seen a beautiful dual cowl pheaton
> Jensen
> with OHV Nash running gear. After the war Jensen built the bodies
> for the
> Austin A40 Sports, and the first Austin Healey roadsters and, in
> turn,
> Austin supplied the running gear for the first big postwar Jensens
> (I think
> these were called Interceptors).
>
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