Yahoo Autos The Frozen Corner of Sweden That Tests the Most Advanced Cars in the World
Finally, I found my loaner car in the parking lot next to the train station in Luleå, Sweden. Its tasteful, drab blue paint peeped out from beneath a fresh blanket of glinting snow. It was a Volvo, of course. What else but a Volvo would I use for a trip up half the length of this long, dangling digit of a country? The streets of Sweden are filthy with Volvos. The semitrucks are Volvos. The heavy-construction excavators are Volvos. The children are Volvos.
And not only did I have a Volvo in Volvoland, but I also had the most Volvo of Volvos among the assorted varieties of Volvos; I had a Volvo station wagon. It was a luxuriously long and low V90. Well, it was a plug-in-hybrid V90, but that wouldn’t matter because where I was heading, the electric outlets in the parking lot were for engine-block heaters, not for recharging fancy lithium-ion battery packs. I was going north of the Arctic Circle to check out the region that’s become Europe’s hot spot for cold-weather vehicle testing. If you drive a European car made in the past few decades, it was probably partly developed here. All I needed was a tank of gasoline, heated seats, and a set of studded Hakkapeliitta 9 extreme winter tires.
But wait, there was a sticker on this car. Actually, there were three of them, one on each rear flank and another on the hatchback. They read “Bilbolaget.com” in an awkward quasi-cursive font. Turns out, bilbolaget means “the car company” in Swedish, a language not often given to flowery rhetorical flourishes. It’s a car dealer. Or a car distributor. Or, well, it’s a car company of some sort. Whatever. I decided then that I would christen him “Bilbo Waggins.” And thus, we began our adventure together.
Before exploring the intricacies of split-mu surfaces and talking with development engineers about their highly tuned buttocks, I needed a bit of recovery from my long airplane flights and the two slip-and-falls I suffered walking one block to the car. Later, I had the following exchange with an engineer:
Dan: As you might be aware, I was just in northern Sweden being cold and slipping on the ice because I wore sneakers, which was not smart.
Engineer: No.
I headed on a quick 45-mile drive north of the Baltic Sea town of Luleå. It would be the last time I’d see pavement for a couple of days. I aimed my wagon down a series of narrow white paths bordered by three-foot-tall snow walls. I imagined I was bobsledding between country houses invariably painted either ketchup red or mustard yellow. I was headed for the Aurora Safari Camp in an area described to me by a Swede as “nowhere.” The Waze mapping app agrees. It simply gave up a few miles from where I needed to be and pretended my destination was in the middle of a road hemmed in by walls of birch, pine, and spruce trees. Eventually, I found the correct location. There, I was packed into an open fiberglass sled, then towed across a frozen lake by snowmobile, a young guy from Texas at the helm. Naturally. Near the opposite shore is a rudimentary building housing a sauna and a hole in the ice where one can take an ice bath. I asked my driver what he thought the chances were that when I jumped in, my heart would stop. “If you’re asking me that, then I think maybe you shouldn’t do it,” he replied. Fair.
The Aurora Safari Camp consists of a few cozy tepee-shaped rooms (which mimic the look of the traditional dwellings used by the area’s indigenous Sámi people), a community building and dining room, lots of trees, and intense quiet. The camp is one of a growing number of tourist spots in the northernmost region of Sweden known as Norrbotten. Most well-known (and Instagram famous) is the Icehotel, which is near the northern tip of the country and has been making guests smell like reindeer pelt for more than 30 years. But newer destinations nearer the Aurora Safari Camp, such as the Treehotel and the Arctic Bath hotel, cater to curious and moneyed travelers for whom modern Scandinavian architecture is part of the allure. Between 2010 and 2019, the number of guest nights in the region rose by 44 percent, according to the Swedish Lapland Visitors Board.
The biggest draw, apart from the novel experience of living within a snow globe, is the northern lights. The aurora borealis is Norrbotten’s current gold strike in a land that has long survived by exploiting its natural resources, including lumber and iron-ore deposits. The area might be one of the best places in the world to catch the celestial light show, but the aurora is a fickle bastard. Despite multiple trips to frigidly northern climes, I have never seen the lights. You probably should not travel there with me.
No problem. Bilbo, ace photographer Reto, and I had to depart early the next morning for Kiruna, Sweden’s northernmost town. So I spent my afternoon with Aurora Safari’s steely-gazed CEO, Jonas Gejke, riding snowmobiles across the blinding white expanse of the lake, then up into the neighboring thickly wooded hills, with a brief break to gnaw on slabs of dried reindeer and take swigs of hot lingonberry juice.
The 170-mile drive to Kiruna might be the quietest journey I’ve ever completed. Bilbo mushed serenely along a seemingly endless white chute of country paths. They don’t bother trying to melt the snow in the Arctic Circle. Road salt is useless at the temperatures regularly experienced here. Use studded tires. Drive reasonably. Also, mount huge auxiliary lights immediately in front of the grille (don’t worry, your car is not likely to overheat). It gets dark early here and stays that way. Plus, the lights look amazing.
I initially planned to stop in the town of Jokkmokk (say “YUCK-muck,” and yes, that’s also the name of a $249 dining-room set from IKEA) to witness some cold-weather testing firsthand. Volvo has used the military air base at Jokkmokk for winter testing since the late Eighties. But security is tight these days. I was told I might be able to visit under some simple conditions: I could not drive on the premises. No photographs could be taken at the facility. I could not admit I was there. I could not acknowledge that Sweden is real. So I headed to Kiruna, where the company has maintained a site since 1995. That is if you believe such a place exists.
Northern Sweden is chockablock with automotive test facilities. Anywhere there is a lake that freezes in the winter can be a test facility. And that describes most of northern Sweden. Audi, BMW, Jaguar Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, and basically every other European carmaker tests here. So do some Asia-based manufacturers, such as Hyundai. Then there are the suppliers, such as Bosch. The boom in winter testing here started with suppliers as they developed anti-lock braking systems, and it’s grown unabated ever since [see “One Opel, Two Dietmars, and the Making of Arjeplog,” page 033].
But I wanted to stick with the home team. Jokkmokk and Kiruna aren’t the only locations Volvo uses. The company claims to have several secret test sites as well. The Kiruna facility, so near that thriving metropolis (about 23,000 area residents), is usually reserved for testing vehicles Volvo has publicly unveiled.
