Last week’s post briefly touched on the initial design ideation for Volvo’s next-generation small cars which would replace the Swedish automaker’s compact S40 sedan and V40 station wagon. Those quick sketches and their accompanying descriptions, nearly one hundred in all, as I recall, were reduced to fit in an A4 portrait format and then bound into handy reference books for Volvo management to peruse at their leisure.

We instinctively knew that the compact-car segment was beginning to fragment, not least with the addition of smaller sport-utility vehicles such as the Honda CR-V and Toyota RAV4. Thanks to our new Ford connections, we learned of the Blue Oval’s compact unibody Escape sport-utility (Maverick in Europe) and Land Rover’s compact Freelander SUV, both in late-stage development for U.S. introduction in the 2001 and 2002 model years respectively.

It seemed that a market opportunity could exist for a Volvo entry positioned above the Asians and domestics but below the compact Land Rover entry. And after all, an “all-activity vehicle” was one of the avenues explored by Volvo design teams and enshrined in the aforementioned reference books…

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