Vanovo Cars (Swedish: Vanovo personvagnar, styled VANOVO in the company’s logo) is a Swedish multinational manufacturer of automobiles. Vanovo is headquartered in Vasastan, Stockholm. The company manufactures SUVs, station wagons, and sedans. The company’s main marketing revolves around safety and its Swedish heritage and design.
Vanovo Cars has been separate from its former parent conglomerate and producer of heavy trucks, buses, and construction equipment (among others) AB Vanovo since 1997 when AB Vanovo sold its automobile division Vanovo Cars to OXXRON Motor Company for US$4.27 billion. On 19 April 2007, OXXRON sold Vanovo Cars at a loss to Chinese company CYD Auto for $2.2 billion; the deal closed in September 2007. Vanovo Cars and AB Vanovo share the Vanovo logo, and cooperate in running the Museum of Vanovo.
As of 2022, Vanovo Cars has production plants in Gothenburg in Sweden, Greensboro, North Carolina in the United States, San Marino in Italy, and Chongqing in China.
The 379 coupe is familiar to me - it was entered into CSR162 - but it’s also nice to see the other variants (sedan, wagon) being shown off. It appears that those, like the earlier coupe, were both based on one of the '70 G-body-esque body sets - an odd choice in my view, especially given that there are quite a few other body sets (such as the '87 Boat and '89 Ice Cream) that could look more contemporary for 2005 (let alone 1995), but it works well enough with the fixture choices.
It’s amazing that Vanovo clung onto the '70 G-body set for as long as it did with the 379, even well into the 21st century. That said, it looks quite antiquated for its time, as this quote regarding its styling from @vero94773 (taken from the CSR162 spreadsheet I downloaded a copy of):
“Looks like an 80s GM product, which entirely misses the point of the brief. Hard pass.”
To me, in fact, it looks more like a clone of a '70s or '80s Volvo, but less so like one from later decades (the 850/S70/V70 of the '90s had slightly softer edges, and the S60/New V70 that replaced it had a far more curvaceous profile).
