THE Fluffaktor

Northern Sweden's frigid climate once kept all but the hardiest souls away. Now it's one of the area's most valuable resources.

- DANIEL PUND

Finally, I found my loaner car in the parking lot next to the train station in Luleå, Sweden. Its tasteful, drab blue paint peeped out from beneath a fresh blanket of glinting snow. It was a Volvo, of course. What else but a Volvo would I use for a trip up half the length of this long, dangling digit of a country? The streets of Sweden are filthy with Volvos. The semitrucks are Volvos. The heavy-construction excavators are Volvos. The children are Volvos.

And not only did I have a Volvo in Volvoland, but I also had the most Volvo of Volvos among the assorted varieties of Volvos; I had a Volvo station wagon. It was a luxuriously long and low V90. Well, it was a plug-in-hybrid V90, but that wouldn’t matter because where I was heading, the electric outlets in the parking lot were for engine-block heaters, not for recharging fancy lithium-ion battery packs. I was going north of the Arctic Circle to check out the region that’s become Europe’s hot spot for cold-weather vehicle testing. If you drive a European car made in the past few decades, it was probably partly developed here. All I needed was a tank of gasoline, heated seats, and a set of studded Hakkapeliitta 9 extreme winter tires.

But wait, there was a sticker on this car. Actually, there were three of them, one on each rear flank and another on the hatchback. They read “Bilbolaget.com” in an awkward quasi-cursive font. Turns out, bilbolaget means “the car company” in Swedish, a language not often given to flowery rhetorical flourishes. It’s a car dealer. Or a car distributor. Or, well, it’s a car company of some sort. Whatever. I decided then that I would christen him “Bilbo Waggins.” And thus, we began our adventure together.