2006 Volvo S60 2.5t Sedan 4-door 2.5l on 2040-cars

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Junkyard Gem: 1969 Volvo 145 Wagon

Volvo managed to sell the 1940s-design PV544 and its 1950s-design Amazon descendant all the way into the mid-to-late 1960s in the United States, but those iconic machines were replaced here by one that began a line of even more iconic Volvos: the 140 Series. Starting with the 1968 model year, the 140 became available in the United States as a two-door sedan (the 142), a four-door sedan (the 144 and 164), and a station wagon (the 145). These rear-wheel-drive, brick-shaped cars later evolved into the 200 Series and its heirs, with the very last of the breed appearing here in the form of the 1998 S90/V90. That's a lot of history all wrapped up in one vehicle, and so I was pleased to find this 145 in a Denver-area car graveyard earlier this month. This car rolled out of Goteborg with a gleaming coat of Morkgron (dark green) paint and, according to this build tag, was built to California specifications. At some point, it made its way to Colorado. Very few US-market cars had six-digit odometers prior to the middle 1980s, but Volvo felt optimistic about their cars' longevity (at a time when reaching the magical 100,000-mile mark was something that rarely happened with non-Mercedes-Benz vehicles) and so now we can see that this car made it well past 200k miles. The 2.0-liter pushrod four-cylinder engine in this car can trace its ancestry back to the Amazons, P1800s, and PV544s of the early 1960s, and it was rated at 115 horsepower. A six-cylinder version of the 140 sedan, known as the 164, could be purchased here as well (though it had few American takers). But wait— what's that Detroit-looking two-barrel carburetor doing on an engine that's supposed to have a Stromberg 175? Yes, it's a GM-spec Rochester clone built at the ancient Bay City Plant (now known as GM Powertrain) in Michigan. Earlier Volvos came with a pair of British-made Skinner Union sidedrafts, which could be pretty painful to keep working right, but perhaps even the less-oddball Stromberg proved too much hassle for whoever installed this carb (which was meant to go on engines with much more displacement than a Volvo B20). Transmission choices in the 1969 140: a four-on-the-floor manual or a three-speed automatic. This car has the manual. The interior is pretty thrashed, as is usually the case with the 140s I find during my junkyard explorations.

Current Volvo XC90 to live on in China?

The current, long-serving Volvo XC90 might not be going away as soon as we thought - at least not in China. According to word from CarNewsChina, the crossover's production will be moved to Daqing, China, in December and from that point on, be built at Geely's factory. The only available engine will be a 2.5-liter turbocharged five-cylinder.
According to the report, the present XC90 and the imminent next-generation model will both be sold in the market, but the Chinese-made vehicle will be positioned as a cheaper alternative. Geely will also develop a crossover of its own from the platform that should be ready in late 2015.
Volvo plans to launch the new XC90 later this year to replace the aging model, which has been on the market for over a decade. It will ride on the company's new Scaleable Product Architecture platform and will be powered by the automaker's new Drive-E four-cylinder engine family. Hybrid versions will also be available.

Volvo demos autonomous self-parking car concept

A number of companies are developing autonomous vehicle technology - Google and Audi come to mind - but Volvo is applying its work in the area to a particular usage case: parking. The Swedish automaker has the technology up and running in a concept vehicle, which it says can be dropped off at the curb by its owner and left to its own devices to enter and navigate a car park, then find and park in an available parking spot. Volvo says the process can even be reversed when the owner is ready to go, with the car leaving the car park on its own to meet its key-holder again at the curb.
The vehicle first interacts with Vehicle 2 Infrastructure technology, which places transmitters in the road itself to inform the car (and driver) if the self-parking service is available. The driver then hops out, activates the Self Parking function on his or her smartphone and then leaves the car to do its work. The car uses sensors, all seemingly hidden from view (an advancement of its own in this field), to autonomously navigate the car park, which includes interacting and adjusting to other cars, people and objects.
The technology used here builds off of Volvo's other work in autonomous vehicle research, namely the Safe Road Trains for the Environment (SARTRE) project in which the company managed to create a train of four cars autonomously following a lead truck at speeds up 56 miles per hour. Volvo says the first application of its autonomous research in a production vehicle will happen at the end of 2014 with some level of autonomous steering available in the next-generation XC90. See the system in action by watching the video below.