Volvo Cars
This is the catalogue record of the Volvo S40, one of 83 models Volvo Cars has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1995. 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 S40 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1990s were the decade of refinement — airbags and ABS became universal, Japanese build quality set the world standard, and the modern SUV segment was effectively invented. 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 Toyota Toyota Tacoma, the BMW BMW Z3, the Honda Honda CR-V — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Volvo S40 reads like this: the record lists its engine as ubl |Petrol: |1.6 L B4164S I4 |1.7 L B4184S I4 |1.8 L B4184S2/S3 I4 |1.9 L B4194T turbo I4 |1.8 L Mitsubishi B4184SJ/SM GDI I4 |2.0 L B4204S I4 |2.0&n; kerb weight is recorded at S40: / 1220 - / V40: / 1234 -; drive goes through 5-speed Renault M3P Manual transmission / manual / 5-speed Renault M5P/M5D manual / 5-speed Volvo M56 manual / 4-speed Aisin AW50-42LE Automatic transmission / automatic / 5-speed ; the layout is Front-engine, front-wheel-drive or 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 Volvo Cars's own catalogue the Volvo S40 sits alongside the Volvo 140 Series (1966), the Volvo 142, the Volvo 145 (1967), the Volvo 164. The record names the Volvo 440/460 as its predecessor and the Volvo V40 II / Polestar 2 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Peter Horbury. Assembly is recorded at Netherlands: Born, Netherlands / Born (VDL Nedcar / NedCar) / Malaysia: Shah Alam (Swedish Motor Assemblies / SMA) / Botswana: Gaborone (The Motor Company of Botswana / TMBC) / Sou.
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.
The catalogue records what the Volvo S40 was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in 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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Ownership verdicts are computed from NHTSA complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, re-priced for your country. Verdicts are published per model year as the data is ingested — browse them live, or open the true-cost calculator to price any year yourself.
Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.