AB Volvo · introduced 1959
The Volvo L3314 is a range of military vehicles produced by Volvo. In the early 1950s Volvo received an order to develop a new utility vehicle for the Swedish Army. A pre-run series of 90 vehicles, named the L2304, was delivered between 1959 and 1961. It was powered by a Volvo B16 engine. Full scale deliveries of the somewhat improved L3314 began in 1963. The L3314 was powered by the 1.8L B18. The L33-series was offered with different body-variants such as hard-top, half-cab, soft-top, or special versions mounting anti-tank weapons.
All vehicles are forward control (where the cab is located over the front axle), except the open L3304. The base version was the L3314SU softtop. Other versions were the L3314HT hardtop with mechanical winch, the L3304 anti-tank gun vehicle and the L3315 communications version, with a shielded 24V system. The L3314 was succeeded by the Volvo C303 in the late 1970s. An upgraded version of the L3314 was offered on the civilian market in 1977 as the C202 Laplander. It was a hard-top with the more powerful B20 engine instead of the B18, but with less robust axles and no differential brake. The C202 was manufactured exclusively in Hungary Csepel Car Factory as a cheaper alternative to the more expensive C303. Civilian versions of the L3314 series, as well as the C202, are often called the Volvo "LAPLANDER".
From the Wikipedia article Volvo L3314, CC BY-SA.
Among the 34 AB Volvo entries in the MotorJury library, the Volvo L3314 holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 1959. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Volvo L3314 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1950s were the optimistic post-war boom, when chrome, tailfins and new unibody construction met the first purpose-built motorways and sports-car racing shaped reputations. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Dodge Dodge Challenger, the Nissan Nissan Patrol, the Mini Mini — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Volvo L3314 reads like this: the record lists its engine as L2304: 1583 cc Volvo B16 engine / B16 I4 / L3314: 1778 cc Volvo B18 engine / B18 I4 / C202: 1986 cc Volvo B18 engine#B20 / B20A I4; kerb weight is recorded at Pickup: 1600 kg / Hardtop: 1795 kg; drive goes through L3314: 4-speed M42 manual transmission / manual / C202: 4-speed M45 manual transmission / manual; the layout is Mid-engine, four-wheel-drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.
Within AB Volvo's own catalogue the Volvo L3314 sits alongside the Volvo 144, the Volvo 264 TE, the Volvo 440/460, the Volvo 700 Series. The record names the TP21 as its predecessor and the Volvo C303 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to sp =. Assembly is recorded at L3314: Sweden (Lundby, Gothenburg / Lundby) / C202 Laplander: Hungary (Csepel_Automobile_Factory / Csepel Automobile Factory Szigethalom).
This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.
Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.
A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Volvo L3314 was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.
Specifications come from the Wikipedia infobox for this model (CC BY-SA) and the open Wikidata record, and are shown only where a source actually carries them — nothing here is estimated. Figures are manufacturer specifications, not measured results.
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Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.