http://www.matthewsvolvosite.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=28297
"I think that the Ford/Volvo legacy will be seen in retrospect as part of the failed late 20th/early 21st century attempt by automakers to consolidate into a few major players. Ford purchased Volvo during the heady days of the late '90's when gas was as good as free in the United States, SUV's were the rage and the automakers were getting rich off of them. The American car manufacturers went on a buying binge, snapping up most of the remaining small, independent, and quirky brands. Volvo, Saab, Land Rover, Aston Martin, etc. etc. Virtually every one of those ventures ended as badly, or worse, than the Ford/Volvo venture.
I agree with you that Volvo largely lost their way when they left the 850/early V70 box design and attempted to go mainstream like everyone else. Once the cars looked and felt much like anything else on the road, their loyal customers had little incentive to stay with them. It is becoming one of my beliefs that niche players like Volvo and Saab can be successful only if they understand their core competencies and keep true to those values. If they do this well, customers will typically remain loyal to them; even to the point of over-looking their (often many) weaknesses. When they lose those values and try to become mainstream (as often happens when a larger company takes over and management cannot truly understand the smaller business they have acquired), the loyal base is no longer willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and to the average consumer, they aren’t even worth a look because they don’t have the reliability reputation of a Toyota or Honda, nor the cachet of a BMW or Mercedes. In Saab's case, the irony was that under GM's ownership, they were building what were, in many ways, superior cars to what they had been able to build on their own, but their old customers didn’t care; they had ceased to be the ‘real’ Saab.
Volvo certainly suffered from the fact that they were acquired during a period of relatively poor quality control at Ford, and that didn't do them any favors. During much of this period they were also plagued by Ford's antipathy towards anything that wasn't a truck or SUV, and, like the other two of the Big Three, they nearly went under as a result when gas prices soared and the economy plunged. They had ignored their car divisions for so long that they no longer knew how to build good cars. Ford was fortunate to escape without government loans only because of a stroke of luck that had allowed them to shore up private financing immediately prior to the bank crisis of the Fall of 2008. If they had waited a month longer, that financing would not have been available, and they would have been in the same boat as GM. In any case, those close calls required raising every cent of real cash that could be mustered just to stay solvent, and those brands that had been acquired in the ‘90’s had to be let go at whatever price they could get for them. It’s too bad for us Volvo fans, as Ford has recently turned a corner, and is making their best vehicles ever; it’s too bad Volvo won’t have an opportunity to be a part of it."