Success and expansion in the latter 1950s led management to begin planning for the Torslanda Plant in 1959 in a rural area that had been intended by city planners as a future industrial use. As well, infrastructure had already been in place, the port and the open sea were nearby, and the city of Göteborg’s airport was also located in Torslanda. Containing 200,000 square metres of factory floorspace at its inception, production capacity was originally planned at 110,000 cars a year in single-shift operation, with the possibility of increasing to 150,000 cars in two-shift operation. The annual production record from 1973, when 178,000 cars left the factory, still held, as of 2004. The plant was inaugurated on Friday 24 April 1964, with production beginning in the TA plant, the TB plant and the TC plant. Production on a smaller scale had actually begun in 1962, when approximately a third of the factory was ready to assemble Amazons. Volvo’s President Gunnar Engellau, Doctor of EngineeringGustav Larson, and Swedish king Gustaf VI Adolf were on hand for the inauguration. The first car manufactured was an Amazon, while the PV544 was never built in Torslanda. The Volvo 144, and a completely new model, was launched into production in late summer 1966. Production ceased in Volvo Lundby plant in 1973 with the demise of the Volvo 1800ES. Torslanda production was supported by operations in Canada at Volvo Halifax Assembly and Volvo Kalmar Assembly and later with plants in North America, and later Ghent, Belgium. Originally employing about 2500 people the plant became Sweden’s largest workplace. Currently, a workforce of about 5000 can produce the current capacity of 170,000 cars. By 1998, the plant received carefully coordinated parts deliveries from the nearby supplier park in Arendal. Today, the plant builds the Volvo XC90, Volvo S90, Volvo V90, Volvo S60, and Volvo V60 — on the SPA or P3 platform — with robots performing almost 100 percent of all welding operations. The paintshop was at the time of its commission in the 1990s the cleanest in the automotive world. Recent investments allow a long-term capacity of 230,000 cars a year. By 2014, Volvo Cars successfully completed an expansion of its Torslanda plant in its home town of Gothenburg, Sweden. Volvo uses the Torslanda plant for production of the 2nd Generation XC90. The recent expansion included a new body shop that will be used to manufacture the new XC90, which will be the first vehicle to ride on Volvo's new Scalable Product Architecture and added 24,000 square meters to the plant's footprint, boosting the facility's annual capacity from 200,000 vehicles to 300,000 vehicles.
