Today Volvo Cars Gent celebrates 40 years as a production plant. The plant was inaugurated on November 3rd 1965. Since then, over three million Volvo cars have been manufactured there.
On 3 November 1965 Prince Bertil of Sweden formally opened the Volvo plant in Ghent, Belgium.This was Volvo’s first major assembly plant outside Sweden. In the forty years since then the Ghent plant has grown into one of Volvo Cars’ two main assembly plants, with more than three million cars to its name.
During 1965 and 1970 some 26,000 units of Volvo Cars' icon, the Volvo Amazon (Volvo 120 series) were made in Ghent. The painted bodies were at that time shipped from Gothenburg. In 1972 the plant became a complete car manufacturing plant with the addition of a body shop and a paint shop.
Volvo models manufactured at the Ghent plant are: 120, 140, 240, 760, 740, 850, S70, V70, S60, S40 and V50.
Some 5,200 employees work at Volvo Cars Gent today, building the four Volvo models V70, S60, S40 and V50 - all in the same production flow.
50250/KP
