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Irvine celebrates 50,000 Volvos

4th December 1997
Page 18
Page 18, 4th December 1997 — Irvine celebrates 50,000 Volvos
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Keywords : Volvo, Tractor, Buses

• Volvo has celebrated the 50,000th vehicle to be built at its plant in Irvine, Ayrshire.

The chassis was an FL10-360 tractive unit—one of 22 destined for Roadferry, a distribution and warehousing specialist operating mainly between the UK and Ireland.

The tractor was handed over to Roadferry managing director Jim McGhee by Hans-Erik Eriksson, general manager of Volvo Truck and Bus Assembly. Eriksson described Roadferry as "a valued Volvo customer for many years". Roadferry's latest 4x2 and 6x2 tractors join a fleet which includes 500 trailers.

The Irvine plant was opened in 1975 and has been growing fast over the past ten years. It now employs around 500 workers and is building vehicles at a rate of about 4,500 a year on two production lines. These are mostly FL trucks, though in recent years the proportion of bus chassis has grown to nearly half the total output. Irvine started to build FH tractors a couple of years ago, but declining demand on the Continent led production to be shifted to other plants.

Around 10°0 of Irvine's output is exported, some of it back to Scandinavia. The relatively small size of the plant makes it ideal for short runs of specialist vehicles, and low UK labour costs allow it to build vehicles more cheaply than other European plants.

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Organisations: Bus Assembly

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