GL and/or Larson, Cars/Sweden, Konditori 100s Garage

GL and/or Larson - Cars made in Sweden, info from Konditori 100

Year and place: 1926, Stockholm

I guess that you have seen at least one of the cars that have the GL (and/or Larson) cars as an origin. If not in real life, maybe in the background (or foreground) in movies from the U.S.A.

No, it is not an american car.

Lets take it from the beginning. Which was in August 1924 when the sales chief for AB Svenska Kullagerfabriken (SKF, constructing ball-bearings), Assar Gabrielsson, had a meeting with metal workshop chief Gustaf Larson from Nya AB Galco.

Good conditions
When Gabrielsson worked as chief for SKFs subsidiary in Paris in the early 1920s, he noted for the first time that Sweden had good conditions to construct cars. Sweden was a well developed industrial nation, the salaries were comparable low, swedish steel had a good reputation worldwide, and there was a want for cars built for the swedish climate and roads.

Larson had practiced at a motor company in Britain when there was a car boom with the start of many new companies. He had also worked at SKF some years.

When they met in August 1924 they made an agreement to start car production in Sweden in a larger scale.

A month later Larson presented a cost estimation, based on production of 4.000 cars a year. At the same time he began the construction of the first car. A year later orders was made for parts for a series of test cars.

To build or not to build?
Initially the plan was to construct the cars entirely with parts that they produced themselves.

At the time there were a great number of car part producers in Europe and the U.S.A., and probably all kinds of parts were to be bought. Other companies made catalogues of accessible parts that was needed to put cars together. So, a car producer could build cars without having to construct own parts.

But, the estimated costs to make everything themselves was too high, and Gabrielsson and Larson had to change the plan.

The result was a compromise. Their company should construct the parts, a number of selected companies should get the order to mass-produce parts and deliver them according to the quality demands (with quality checked already during the production), and their company should assemble the cars. The parts should primarily be mass-produced by swedish companies.

To get things rolling
The planning and preparing work was kept secret. Still employeed, Larson used his spare time to start the construction. To his help he had a few interested technicians. Among them Jan G Smith, who during the 1910s had worked at some car factories in the U.S.A. where he from 1914 and on had collected articles and other information about car production. He had also made his own sketches and calculations, which he brought with him back to Sweden in 1924.

A task for Gabrielsson was to find people willing to invest in the company. He couldn't make it.

The only way to get the interest of investors are to have a finished product to show them, they understood. Gabrielsson got bank loans and used own capital for a test series, and in September 1925 they decided to build 9 open cars and one covered car.

The first cars
The frames was produced by Bofors, and was (naturally?) delivered painted canon-grey.

The design of the bodies were made by a car-interested painting artist. They had long curved fenders and small doors. The open cars were very similar, but not identical. To easier distinguish them they were painted in different colours.

One of the preparations involved an engineer working for the company Separator, who began production of among others sinks in 1926. He was visiting the U.S.A. to study the manufacturing of enamel, when he got a telegram from his managing director. The company in Olofström had been visited by Larson and Gabrielsson, and the engineer was ordered to quickly learn everything about manufacturing car bodies. He learnt that it took about five years to manufacture the machines to form the steel plates, but when he came back to Sweden he was given 6 months. Yes, he made it. The engineers name was Karl Granfors, who may have been a relative to my family. (In 1950 the companies value of producing car bodies became higher than their production of sinks. Volvo bought the company in 1969, then named Svenska Stålpressnings AB. In 1995 Volvos car bodies, or most parts of them, still were pressed in Olofström. Maybe they still are?)

The engines were produced by Penta. Originally boat engines, converted for use in the cars.

Here began some confusion. The cars were called GL (initials of Gustaf Larson) or Larson. Some were registred as GL, and others as Larson. Each car also got a nickname, such as "The Mermaid" and "The Troll Child".

It was seemingly more or less decided that the mass produced cars was to be called Larson.

The news was spread
The secret began to break in mid May 1926, and soon there were wellspread rumours and incorrect information about a new swedish car.

The first test car was finished in early June, and it was driven from Stockholm to Gothenburg for a visit to SKFs technical experts.

On August 19, 1926, an important meeting was held with the management of SKF, which led to a contract signed two days later.

Gabrielsson became the managing director of the new company that was taken over from SKF (a competitor that SKF had bought in the beginning of the century in order to bring it out of business - but they kept the name valid), and Larson became the technical chief.

The name of the car company is still Volvo.

The rest of the test
The last of the test cars were finished around the end of the year. Some of them were later rebuilt to small cargo cars, and used for transports for the new company.

Only one of the 10 test cars remain today, an open car that was grey but later repainted dark blue. It was sold to a photographer in Gothenburg in the mid 1930s, who later donated it to a museum in Gothenburg.

To read more about the test results, see under Volvo.