Zertifizierungspartner
 
 
 

Our internship with Volvo in Gotheborg, Sweden 2008

We left Austria in the early morning on the 10 th of August and our first destination was Munich. There we changed from train / car to airplane and left warm Germany for cold and rainy Gothenburg. That was the beginning of our five week internship in Sweden. We were 9 students from the HTL Vöcklabruck, 2 from the HTL Hallein and 1 from the HTL Linz.


Volvo Torslanda plant in Göteborg

In Sweden we got an overview, about how big car plants operate. Everybody worked in different areas of the factory, such as Paintshop, Mainstorage or Special Vehicels.

Volvo Cars Torslanda
  • Area: 3.75 km² (about 350 Soccer fields)
  • About 4 500 employees (2009: 3 600)
  • Coffee consumption about 3000 liters per day (coffee is for free in the whole plant!)
  • 4 different restaurants, with great cooks
  • Every two minuets a car leaves the production
Paintshop

Werner Kritzinger (5BHWII), Daniel Kroiß (5AHWII), Möslinger Daniel (5BHWII) , Dominik Reichinger (HTL Linz)

Some of us worked in the maintenance department and the others had their duties in the repair area. The main tasks in the maintenance were to take care of the storage, to analyze the current stocks of frequency converters and to present our recommendations for an update to a new series.

In the repair area there was one main project, which was to analyze scrapes on painted car bodies and to interpret those information. We also had to redesign their current scrape-data-recording system. Finally we presented our results to our supervisors.

Special Vehicles Service

Stefan Eicher (5AHWII), Marko Jozic (HTL Hallein), Robert Konrad (8ABMIM), Christoph Madl (HTL Hallein), Andreas Rappold (5BHWII)

At the beginning everyone of us was allotted to an employee. Through this, all of us had to work at a different workplace. One job was to preparate the finished cars and park them afterwards at the parking space. Furthermore the montage from extra equipment like for instance: DVD-Player, side skirts, sport exhaust emissions and so on. At last the demounting from broken vehicle parts like bumper, doors and so on.

Assemly

Christoph Aschl (5AHWII), Mathias Preuner (5AHMIM)

We were disposed to the maintenance of the assembly area. Our jobs varied every day. But a bigger part of our work was the maintenance of the office area, were we did for instance: repairing printer, formatting hard disks, service the network and so on. Though we received an good impression over the whole Volvo area, because we had also some work to do in other parts of the factory.


No moose has ever overturned a Volvo!

Volvo Trucks

Konrad Bohn (8ABMIM)

My workplace was at Volvo Trucks at the development and engineering. I developed a new article for the tank. Because with an ordinary filler neck the whole volume of tank cannot be used. I designed at first two solutions with ProEngineer. Afterwards I talked about this with my supervisor. At last I worked at the calculation and the dimensioning of the filler neck.

Apartment

We had two Apartments, were in each slept six people. Our flat was really great, because we had only five minutes to the next bus –and tram stop and further ten minutes to centre. Only the way to Volvo was a little bit long and stressful, because it took 50 minutes to get to the company. Opposite of our flat was a small restaurant and a supermarket, unfortunately was this more expensive than in Austria.

Also the equipment was super: dishwasher, microwave, LCD-TV and so on. Only the bathroom was a little to small for 6 persons. Especially in the morning it was difficult. Also the internet access was not exactly brilliant. So, there was just one access-point for the whole apartment and the fee was 25€ per week. But we were able to solve the problem in a mysterious way and paid only 25€ for all the 5 weeks.


The largest wooden roller coaster in the world

Leisure time activities
On the one hand we went with the ferry to see the southern island near to Gothenburg and on the other hand some of us had the chance to go with their supervisor to a boat trip to the northern islands. We did also a guided boat tour through Gothenburg. As well we had the enjoyment to visit the biggest amusement park in Scandinavia. It’s called “Liseberg” and there’s also the largest wooden roller coaster in Scandinavia. Furthermore we visited a soccer match (SWE-FRA) in the “Ullevi”-stadium, diverse museums, an aero-show, a zoo and a sailing regatta. But the highlight for us was surely the ending with the test-driving on the Volvo test track. We were allowed to drive all up-to-date models, like the new XC90 with a V8 motor. That would have been also nice for Mr. Treml and Ms. Pillichshammer who visited us in the week before the last one.

Concluding we want to thank Mr. Gernot Weissensteiner for the excellent organisation and also special thanks to Mrs. Gisela Bohlin, Mr. Steve Frank and Mr. Eric Alexandersson.