Volvo Ice test Track - Lule Documentary

During the lingering northern Swedish winters, temperatures regularly drop to -35˚C and below. By comparison, the cold box of your average domestic fridge freezer is -18˚C. And yet it is this extreme cold that makes it a perfect environment for testing Volvo cars.

Lying just inside the Arctic Circle, in Swedish Lapland, Volvo Cars’ winter testing facility is celebrating 30 years of helping make its cars more enjoyable to drive, more reliable and able to cope with any condition. It’s part of a network of facilities and public road tests around the globe, where Volvo’s vehicle dynamics experts assess, refine and improve the driving attributes of their cars. Across tens of thousands of miles and over thousands of hours and in all conditions imaginable – whether stifling desert heat in the USA, pothole-strewn northern European public roads and, here, in the Arctic – Volvo Cars leaves nothing to chance when striving to make cars that can cope with anything. There is even a high-tech driving simulator at Volvo Cars HQ, that allows engineers to ‘drive’ in any conditions they want, without even leaving the comfort of the workshop. It’s another example of Volvo Cars’ craftsmanship and attention to detail.