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First off, resale on new cars is terrible - you're going to lose 10-15% in the first year.
Second, resale on Volvo's is generally not great, as some other posters have stated. They just don't have the draw/cachet that beamers and benzs do, and they don't have the (sometimes undeserved) quality rep that japanese stuff does (among the general populous - you and I both know they're plenty durable!)
Third, it's been speculated for over a year that they would be sold. It doesn't seem to have affected their sales thus far, which were not stellar since the downturn started but not terrible either (on the whole - they had terrible months to be sure).
As I said before, in the even that Geely or another Chinese company does buy Volvo you would end up ultimately dealing with them for parts and service and warranty - but I'm not sure you'd notice in the end. They'll still be manufacturing their parts in Sweden and Germany (mostly) for the near term. I guess I can envision a day when a Chinese owner would want to take advantage of China's manufacturing power and build many parts there, esp anything plastic or electronic... but that's WAY off in the future. I could see that a Chinese owner might want some cars like the new S80 for the growing lux market in China - so maybe they'll start manufacturing China-spec cars there eventually too. Actually they already manufacture a long wheelbase version in China!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo_S80
As far as 'generally' how would a Chinese buyer affect Volvo, I'm of two minds.
On the one hand I think Volvo could really benefit from having lots of money and that 'startup' attitude where profits aren't the be-all-end-all. They are at the heart a research company - though a pragmatic one like Apple or Nintendo. It would be nice to let the engineers have a little more reins and see what happens.
That said on the other hand I think the public perception of the company as a whole could suffer greatly in the western world, where there is already negative sentiment towards China's pervasiveness in our stores. (Ex: there is an Atlantic Canadian company (Highliner) selling frozen/IQF salmon in the grocery stores that actually comes from CHINA! HELLO! There are plenty of salmon in Atlantic Canada! anyway - that's the end of that rant...) What with all the poisonous paint on children's toys and poisonous pet food and the precarious quality of the metal parts like tools etc... I think there could be a major backlash in people's minds and they could simply stop buying Volvos offhand...
But you never know right?
To be honest I think they'll be fine no matter what happens. They still make one of the best wagons in the world, and sell it in NA where it can be hard to find a good wagon. And apart from the nav system their tech is first rate. I think they'll be fine.
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1998 V70 AWD Turbo 195k+
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