Thursday Trivia

Welcome to Thursday Trivia where we offer up a historical automotive trivia question and you try and solve it before seeing the answer after the jump. It’s like a history test, with cars!
This week’s question: From where did the nickname for Volvo’s first car derive?
If you think you know the answer, make the jump and see if you are correct.
When you think about Volvo cars what immediately springs to mind? A slow and boxy ’70s wagon that’s still inexplicably alluring? Maybe a classic sporting car like the P1800 shooting brake with its amazing all-glass hatch that looked like nothing else on the road? The thing of it is, Volvos go back way farther than either of those. The company’s lineage goes back even farther than the Amazons of the ’60s, and the Ford-aping PV series from the post-war era.
No Volvo actually started building cars in the twenties, albeit the very late part of that swinging decade. Volvo itself was officially founded in 1927 as a subsidiary of the industrial component manufacturer, SFK. The company’s first product arrived the same year, however 10 test cars were produced over the course of the year prior. Volvo’s first car was the ÖV4, and as has been Volvo’s penchant ever since the car’s name derived from its physical description – ÖV4 standing for Öppen Vagn 4 cylindrar or an open car with a four-pot motor. The thing of it is, while that very descriptive name is the car’s official designation, the cars also gained an unusual nickname – Jakob.
From Wikipedia:

The model ÖV 4 was often referred to as “Jakob” but that was just a name for one of the 10 pre-series ÖV 4 that was ready on July 25 Jakob’s name-day.

Name day is not something that’s generally celebrated in the U.S., however I’m sure that if you look, Hallmark has a card for it.
The official unveiling of the ÖV4 happened on April 14, 1927. It was supposed to take place a day earlier but when the first production car was put in gear so as to roll out of the factory, it instead shyly moved back from whence it came. It seems that first car’s differential had been improperly installed. It was fixed overnight and ‘Jakob’ was officially born a day later.
Image: Wikipedia