It shouldn't counter intuition that Volvo isn't the biggest risk-taker. Like other European automakers, these successful Swedes had long been aching to expand downmarket but weren't willing to go it alone. So at the turn of the millennium, Volvo tiptoed into the small luxury segment with the S40. Taking little part in the project, Volvo mostly rebadged something called the Mitsubishi Carisma, a car many saw as lacking in the very quality it misspelled. Just to cite one opinion, British magazine Car declared it one of the eight worst cars in all of England (the worst having been the Camaro).
But Volvo's getting more selective about its partners. Okay, maybe the fact that Ford swallowed them a few years ago had some influence, but in any case the new generation of S40 sedans and V50 wagons (Volvo now adds 10 to wagon names) has a big chunk of Ford Focus running gear underneath. That's the new overseas Focus, not the revised first-generation car Ford still sells here. However, Volvo strapped in their very own engines, threw in two stickshifts, and made all-wheel-drive optional - all marked advances over the previous 1.9-liter turbo 4 that struggled to push the front wheels through a 4-speed auto. The platform's completely different and most of the car is now put together in the world waffle capital, Belgium. Still, the question remains: would this be another pseudo-luxury car unable to escape its humble origins, or did a deserving piece of machinery somehow emerge? Only one way to find out.
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