1928 saw the production of the first Volvo bus. It was built-in Sweden on the four-cylinder truck chassis, the Volvo LV4.
The interior was really attractive, with a large number of wooden details and beautiful shiny fabric. The bodies came from different companies.
This one was produced at the Arvika Vehicle Plant. Only a few of these buses were sold. Bus sales did not really take off until six years later, in 1934, when Volvo started building buses on specially adapted chassis.
The company management also discovered that bus customers were prepared to pay more for better quality than truck customers were, so they realised it was worth investing a little more in buses. The new bus was the Volvo B1 and it became really popular. It was exported to South America, for example, where it created a platform for Volvo Buses’ success within the field of public transport.
In 1968, 40 years after they began, bus operations at Volvo became a separate division and, at the end of the 1970s, truck and bus production was separated when the production of buses in Sweden was moved from Gothenburg to a newly built bus plant in Borås. At about the same time, the production of Volvo buses also began in Curitiba in Brazil.
