2004 Volvo V70 R Wagon, Turbo, Awd on 2040-cars

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Volvo bringing Chinese-built cars to America beginning next year

Just because the penetration of the American automotive market by Chinese brands hasn't quite happened yet doesn't mean that Chinese-built cars are far off. According to a new report, we could very soon see long-wheelbase Volvo S60s that were assembled in the People's Republic arriving on US shores.
The report comes from Automotive News China, which cites an anonymous Volvo exec. An official Volvo spokesperson later corroborated ANC's report, although where the original source claimed that we could see the Chinese-built S60L in US dealers at some point in 2015, the company line was that a timeline hadn't been established to begin exports from the world's most populous nation.
According to Volvo, the benefit to exporting from China to the United States rather than from Sweden is the relationship between the US dollar and the Chinese yuan. Overall, it's a less tumultuous issue than the dollar-to-euro situation. By moving vehicles from China to the US, the Chinese-owned company is limiting the degree of risk it's taking with sudden currency swings.

Driveable Volvo V70 wagon built from 400,000 Lego pieces

We've seen life-size Lego vehicles before, but a Swedish man has created the ultimate brick-built car. That's because David Gustafsson's 1:1 scale Volvo wagon actually drives. Volvo recently shared some photos from the Ecar Expo in Gothenburg, Sweden, where the Lego car was on display. One would think that to undertake such a project it would be easiest to re-create an older Volvo, like a 240 or 740 wagon. After all, those were so boxy they earned the nickname Turbo Bricks as a term of endearment from enthusiasts. Instead, Gustafsson chose to replicate his own V70 wagon, a third-generation model built from 2008-16, which has no shortage of complex curves to replicate. Most life-size Lego replicas are static displays, never meant to move. Most don't even have interiors. Gustafsson's Volvo, on the other hand, not only features a full interior, but has doors that swing open, a gear selector that clicks into various positions, and climate control knobs that turn.  The fun doesn't end there. The Lego V70 has side mirrors that pivot, just like the real thing, as well as active headlights that swivel along with the front wheels when the steering wheel turns. The piece de resistance is the fact that this Volvo actually drives, thanks to an electric motor and battery pack. Speeds must be kept low, of course, but it can start, move, steer and brake via a remote control. The Volvo's only non-Lego parts are the wheels and tires, powertrain and a metal frame. It took Gustafsson over a year and over 400,000 pieces to build the car. He was a winner of the Lego Masters competition in 2020, through which he won the majority of the pieces. According to Klyker, the combined weight of the bricks tipped the scales at 1.2 tons, but the win gave Gustafsson the ability to fulfill a lifelong dream of building a full-size car out of Lego. With the help of Volvo Cars, Gustafsson's re-creation will soon begin a tour across Sweden. It will visit various events across the country from February 22 to August 4.

What's the deal with comedians and their cars?

'Round about the time in his life when it should happen for all of us, Jerry Seinfeld's ship came in with a force that almost split the dock. He'd been doing pretty well with his observational style ("There's a cereal now that's just cookies. Have you seen this? Cookies for breakfast. It's called Cookie Crisp. Cookies for breakfast! They oughta just call it 'To Hell With Everything!'"). But he showed no signs of setting the world on fire until he got cast in a show that was either about – depending on the level of comedy geek you ask – the average New Yorker, the very worst people in the world, or nothing. Suddenly Jerry Seinfeld was pretty much the center of the comedy universe. And while his comedy was at once both brilliantly innovative and rooted in the mundane, his next move was a predictable grab at something exotic – he went out and bought his dream car. A rather nice 911, actually. As almost everyone knows, it didn't stop there, and the man put together one of the most enviable collections of iconic Porsches we're likely to see. So what's the connection, if there is one, between cars and comedy? As far as Jerry Seinfeld (the man) is concerned, he's probably not the same guy as the Jerry on Seinfeld (the show) although it's hard to say for sure; his public persona is almost unnervingly well managed. But cars and comedy were the constants in his life then, and, well, just look at what the guy does now; Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee is a cultural constant, and we're certainly seeing Seinfeld the man in that one, and cars are obviously still central to his life. And it's been that way with a lot of very, very good comedy guys. Cars seem to round out their lives, to become the yin to their comedy yang. Ernie Kovacs might not have invented visual gags or surreal humor, but he got them both to kill on television in the 1950s, so he's a comedy hero. He died behind the wheel of his beloved Corvair wagon, so he's absolutely some kind of car-guy hero as well. Bill Cosby, the hottest name in comedy for a good long while, had Ferraris, one of two fire-breathing supercharged big-block Cobras (pictured below), and a BMW 2002tii – none of which either contributed to or in any way make up for the profoundly sociopathic creature he turned out to be, but it's still a data point. The Smothers Brothers, who defied the networks and the norms by getting blatantly political before that sort of thing was cool, went sports car racing.