Would you buy a Geely Urban Nanny?

I was joking a bit in the last post about the Geely Beauty Leopard. Well, the name of Geely's pickup is the PU (funny in and of itself), and the delivery-truck version of it is called either the Urban Nanny or the Rural Nanny, depending on how it's configured.

It's based on the old (ancient) platform of the Daihatsu Charade, another really unfortunately named car, that was actually sold in the US for a couple of years.

I know it's problematic to make fun of the names of cars in other languages, but I seriously hope before Geely ever sells a car in the US they learn how to do focus groups with Americans.

Volvo Potentially to Be Purchased By Chinese Company

Several sources are reporting that the Chinese manufacturer Geely is interested in purchasing Volvo from Ford. Geely is known in the US mostly for making cars with funny names, like the BL (which stands for “Beauty Leopard.” Pictured above, lifted from the dictionary next to the word “ironic.”). Ford has spun off much of its former Premiere Automotive Group (PAG) to other companies. Land Rover, Aston Martin, and Jaguar are now owned by Tata of India, and Volvo is really the last PAG marque left.

Volvo hasn’t been good to Ford. Low sales volumes and losses have made Volvo sort of a liability, and the PAG (in my opinion) hasn’t really had much of a halo effect on Ford. I mean, do most people even know that Ford owns Volvo? The connection really isn’t there.

What would a Geely acquisition mean for you as a consumer? Probably not too much – I doubt that Geely would tinker too much with the cars or their direction. Volvo still has a lot of structure in Sweden, including designers and engineers, so my guess is that the Swedes would keep developing the cars for Volvo, and work double duty making the Geely cars themselves better. The real question is whether or not this is a cost-effective way for Geely to get some Western design and engineering experience. I’ll leave that to the beancounters.

[Sources: NYT, Edmunds, Autoblog]