The C70 Factory's URL is Http://www.AutoNova.se

It currently appears to be down.

Here’s an interesting article I found About AutoNova:

By Daniel Howes / The Detroit News

UDDEVALLA, Sweden -- They're hoping for a windfall here once Ford Motor Co. becomes the biggest carmaker in Sweden.

It was just four years ago that Volvo Car Corp. joined with racing mogul Tom Walkinshaw's TWR Group of the United Kingdom to revive a shuttered Volvo assembly plant and form AutoNova AB, a joint venture that builds Volvo's self-described "image car" -- the C70 coupe and convertible.

Now the plant's 1,000 employees and their managing director, Mike Flewitt, are hoping the luster of the sporty C70 in the U.S. market and Walkinshaw's ties to Ford will entice the Dearborn automaker to consider AutoNova to build a niche vehicle, perhaps for the European market.

""There's no reason we couldn't build a Ford product over here," said Flewitt, who left Ford in 1995 after 14 years with the automaker's operations in the United Kingdom. "AutoNova can only make cars if someone makes them for us."

It's too soon to tell whether Ford -- which is buying Volvo Car from parent AB Volvo for $6.5 billion -- would consider a deal with AutoNova. Since restarting production two years ago, the plant has been criticized for failing to meet production quotas.

"We are producing the cars we want to produce" in Uddevalla, said Tuve Johanesson, president of Volvo Car. Yet he concedes "there have been some problems" at the plant, where cars are built at single stations -- not as they roll down an assembly line.

Last year, AutoNova assembled 11,000 cars for Volvo -- 4,000 shy of the break-even target of 15,000 cars. The plant, opened in 1985 on the site of an old shipyard and idled seven years later, has the capacity to build 40,000 cars per year, Flewitt says.

That's not likely any time soon, despite the increasing popularity of Volvo's C-line cars. For now, Volvo is concentrating on introducing its mid-size S40 sedan and V40 wagon to the North American market. They come from Volvo's joint venture with Mitsubishi Motor Corp. in the Netherlands, far from Uddevalla.

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/Copyright 1999, The Detroit News