Swedish Car Brands

Sweden is one of the top car exporters in Europe. The overall production value is much smaller than that of Italy or Germany, but they somewhat compensate it with the utmost quality of engineering and material, as well as most recent innovations. The modern Scandinavian cars are especially notorious for their ever-growing focus on electric engines.

The first Swedish brands appeared right in the beginning of the previous century, and now Sweden has several international brands.

Volvo

Founded: April 14, 1927
Founder: Gustaf Larson, Assar Gabrielsson
Headquarters: Gothenburg, Sweden
Owners: : AB Industrivärden (7.8%; 25.2% votes); Geely (8.2%; 15.7% votes);
Website: www.volvogroup.com

Volvo is both the largest and most successful brand from this country, as well as one of the older names on the market. The company appeared in 1927 with some confusing around the name, as it was first meant for a ball bearing producer. The first car was built the year before that.

In the coming years, Volvo very rapidly diversified the production, because of which they even now product not just the cars, but also trucks, buses and more.

Scania Vabis

Founded: 1891, Malmö
Founder: Gustaf Erikson
Headquarters: Södertälje, Sweden
Parent organization: Traton
Website: www.scania.com

This one, however, is one of the first Swedish brands by all accounts. It’s also the oldest surviving car brand from this country, being launched in 1911 by the means of the two even older companies.

Scania releases cars once in a while, but their main focus is actually on trucks and also buses. Trucks of different sizes are actually what the company is more known for rather than their cars and other products.

Koenigsegg

Founded: 1994
Founder: Christian von Koenigsegg
Headquarters: Ängelholm, Sweden
Owner: Christian von Koenigsegg
Website: www.koenigsegg.com

Swedes aren’t known for their powerful sports cars. Koenigsegg may be the first fully-fledged high-performance cars producer this kingdom ever had.

It’s a fairly new brand – Koenigsegg was started in 1994 as a personal enterprise by the man with the same name. They were also moderately successful at this, although the manufacturing rates are still miniscule compared to the titans like Ferrari or McLaren.

NEVS

Founded: 2012
Headquarters: Trollhättan, Sweden
Parent organization: China Evergrande New
Subsidiaries: Fujian New Long Ma Motor Co., Ltd., Virtue Surge Limited
Website: www.nevs.com

NEVS is the top electric car producer in Scandinavia, and they are trying to cement this fact by expanding and increasing the production of electric automobiles ever since the company was created in 2012.

It’s true, they still only created one complete model, and it’s mostly based on the cars SAAB (another brand) were developing prior to being purchased (by NEVS). Hopefully, NEVS will succeed where SAAB failed.

Minor brands

Sweden was a home of many more brands throughout the long 100+ year history of Swedish car engineering. Not many of them survived until now, however. Here is a list of brands that did.

Uniti

Founded: January 2016
Founder: Lewis Horne
Headquarters: Tellusgatan 13, Lund, Sweden
Website: www.uniti.earth

Uniti isn’t really a brand yet, as they didn’t create any cars as of this moment. However, they are trying to release an innovative electric car since 2016, and it’s important to mention them because it’s both a valid and a highly discussed endeavor.

SAAB

Founded: 1945
Founder: Saab AB
Feadquarters: Trollhättan, Sweden
Ceased operations: 2013
Parent organizations: NEVS, Saab-Scania, Saab Automobile Investering AB, General Motors Overseas Corporation
Website: saabcars.com

SAAB has been one of the major personal car producers since their birth in 1945. They had a lot of difficulties, which resulted in them going defunct in 2012 for financial reasons. Before that, they created several iconic compact cars in the 80s and 90s.

Caresto

Founded: 1996
Founder: Leif Tufvesson
Headquarters: Ängelholm, Sweden
Website: www.caresto.se

Caresto is a 1996-born car enterprise that produces mostly hot-rod cars using Volvo parts and some technology. They aren’t too well-known outside of their home country, so it’s safe to assume they are concentrating exclusively on the Swedish market.

Von Braun Holding Company

Founded: 1984
Founder: Torbjorn von Braun
Headquarters: Skene, Sweden
Website: vonbraun.com

It’s a small tuning shop where sports cars all over the world are enhanced and tinkered with manually by Swedes since 2014. Again, it’s absolutely unknown in the outside world, but it’s a fairly famous company for the locals.