Volvo P1800

In 1959, Jensen Motors was awarded the contract to assemble Volvo’s new sports coupé, the P1800. Despite a promising start, the project was plagued by delays resulting from organizational and quality control issues, with parts and services arriving from widely dispersed sources in England and Scotland with precious little attention paid to important details. Volvo sent its own inspectors over to England to try to resolve the problems, without much success, and a mutual blame game resulted in which all parties sought to excuse their own deficiencies. Eventually, in 1962 Volvo decided to remove the whole production process to Sweden and pay Jensen Motors a hefty sum in compensation. The first 6,000 of the eventual total of about 39,000 P1800s were built by Jensen at West Bromwich. Aside from their early chassis numbers, they are distinguishable by the cow-horn bumpers fitted to all of the Jensen-built cars (and found on the early Swedish production). Rust problems afflicted the early cars and there are relatively few survivors.