Volvo PV36 Carioca, Really Classic and Contenporaries

Volvo PV36 Carioca - Here is an article that review about Volvo PV36 Carioca. In this article will discuss spesifications, the ins and outs of Volvo PV36 Carioca. For more details, please read this article. Visually different from most of its contemporaries, and totally different from every other Volvo car.

The Volvo PV36, perhaps better known as the Carioca, is an exciting chapter in the Volvo history. It is also quite famous in automotive history if you consider how few examples were actually built and by such a small manufacturer like Volvo Car Corporation.

The history of these cars is yet another version of the eternal question about whichever was first, the chicken or the egg. What is the truth? Yes, Chrysler was first to put its Airflow on the market in 1934, but that does not automatically mean that Volvo copied its styling.

At the beginning of the 1930s, annual sales of Volvos amounted to less than 1,000 cars. They were conventional and rather similar models; six cylinder engines in sturdy frames, steel panels on wooden body framework, separate wings and running boards, outside luggage trunks, upright radiators and separate headlamps. They looked like most cars did at the time, however unusually well designed and built. Responsible for the restrained styling of the first Volvo cars was artist Helmer MasOlle.

The Volvo PV36 which arrived in the spring of 1935 bore, however, no traces of the painter's hand. This car was one man's work and that man was Ivan Örnberg, a headstrong and versatile engineer who came to Volvo in 1931 from the Hupp Motor Co in Detroit, makers of Hupmobile. Without the interference of either Assar Gabrielsson or Gustaf Larson, the usually very engaged and interested founders of Volvo, Örnberg ran the PV36 project from start to finish. Almost. He died suddenly in the late summer of 1936 when the car was just little more than a year.

At the beginning of 1934, the Hupmobile Aerodynamic was presented. From the windscreen and forward it had a certain plough like streamline shape, but the rest of it was rather conventional. It was good-looking though without any particular individuality. It had a fully-pressed steel body, including the entire roof, fitted to a separate frame and was from a technical standpoint not in any way extreme.

The Volvo PV36 was equipped with the latest six cylinder engine version, the EC of 3.67 litres capacity and with just over 80 horsepower. It sat below a bonnet which was integrated with the front where the headlamps were faired in, surrounding a traditional but nicely stylized Volvo radiator grille which followed the shape of the front rather than standing on its own like on other Volvos. The front wings were still almost separate and if the headlamps had been placed on top of them, rather than being blended into the front, the streamline ambitions would hardly have been noticed.

The designation PV36 had nothing in common with the logical numbering used on the other Volvo models. Instead it was thought to evoke a feeling that "the car of the future has arrived already today", in other words the 36 already in 1935. If those responsible for this had given it another thought, they would have discovered how quickly this thought about the future could be reversed into the opposite. The last PV36s were only sold in September 1938.

Just like the Hupp Motor Co and Chrysler Corporation, AB Volvo in Sweden also had to accept the sad fact that cars like these did not really have a market in the mid-1930s.They were twenty years ahead of their time with their streamlined and unconventional bodies. Car customers - and Volvo customers in particular - wanted conventional styling in harmony with the times, small visual changes.

It the autumn of 1938 the last Volvo PV36 Carioca was sold. By then, the Volvo PV51 and PV52 had already been on the market for two years, founding the basis for all other Volvos to enter the market during the rest of the 1930s. Viewed from behind, these cars showed resemblance to the Volvo PV36 but they featured the traditional Volvo front; separate headlights and an upright radiator grille leaned slightly backwards. Meanwhile, the Olofström press plant had developed new tools and solved the problems with large one-piece pressings; these cars had all-steel bodies.