Volvo's "Bad English Country Road"

Stumbled across this on Reddit and it made me laugh.

A Swedish poster shared a video from Volvo's Hällered Proving Ground. It's a sprawling 700-hectare facility tucked into the forests near Borås, about an hour east of Gothenburg.

It's where Volvo has been quietly torturing its cars since 1973, and it has nineteen different test tracks, each designed to recreate a specific kind of automotive misery.

There's a corrosion track with a saltwater spray system. A high-speed bowl with banked curves where they wind cars up past 200 km/h. A comfort track with twenty different surface types, including Vienna cobblestones. And, somewhere in there, a section explicitly modelled on what Volvo's engineers describe as a "bad English country road."

In the video, the presenter whines, "We wouldn't be able to drive like this for too long. We'd be completely exhausted."

There is something delightful about the idea of Volvo engineers convening in a meeting room in Sweden, looking at a map of England, and concluding that a B-road through the Cotswolds is the gold standard for vehicular abuse.

They're not wrong of course. In fact many of our A roads provide useful challenge to Swedish metal too thanks to our plague of potholes.

Find some proper backroads though and the patched tarmac, root damage, frost damage, mud and sunken drains will have any car bouncing around, or its driver making seemingly random manoeuvres without warning. Those are the inputs that destroys bushes, dampers and alloy wheels, which is presumably why Volvo built one in a forest.

It's not unique to Volvo, either. Most major manufacturers have something similar tucked away. Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Porsche all use sections of their proving grounds (and the Nordschleife) to chase chassis durability.

Closer to home, the UK has Millbrook Proving Ground in Bedfordshire, a 700-acre facility that JLR, Aston Martin, McLaren and most of the motoring press have used at one point or another.

Volvo's characterisation of our tarmac is telling. The roads here aren't fast or particularly dangerous in the international sense. They're just relentlessly demanding of machine and driver. They're ull of small inputs that a driver has to keep absorbing, hour after hour.

Worth a nose... looks like a fun place: https://www.volvocars.com/se/l/hallered/

Dave E

April 2026