Volvo 140 Series History

Introduced for the 1967 model year, the Volvo 140 Series replaced the Amazon with a more upright, purpose-built shape. The 144 four-door sedan arrived first in late 1966, followed by the 142 two-door and the 145 five-door wagon. Volvo's tri-digit naming logic encoded the car's fundamentals: first digit = series (1), second = cylinders (4), third = doors.

The 140 Series was Volvo's first model to be equipped with disc brakes on all four wheels as standard, and its passive-safety engineering was a direct forebear of modern crash-structure thinking. More than 1.25 million cars were built across the model's eight-year life, making it Volvo's first million-seller before being replaced by the 240 Series in 1974.