Volvo’s decision to go electric should spark change in industry

Announcement that company will be battery-, hybrid-powered by 2019 is a challenge to rivals

I was worried that she was feeling under the weather. I refer here to the 1993 Volvo 240 DL Classic wagon that our family still drives. Well, my sons still drive. Her exhaust pipe just plumb fell off the other day. It was rusted all to heck. Poor thing.

Or maybe this is part of some grand plan. Maybe she has entered her alpha car stage. Maybe she wants to sound louder, bolder as she approaches her quarter century. If so, shedding the tail pipe has not had the desired effect. She growls like she always has. However, that high-pitched squeal she emits on each and every turn has been sharply effective in putting the neighbourhood on notice when she’s coming or going, even if she doesn’t stay out quite as late as she used to.

So know that I approach Volvo’s electrification announcement with a long held optimism bias. The news hit the auto industry like a bolt: all Volvo models sold after 2019 will have an electric motor, making Volvo the first conventional (ie., internal combustion engine) car company to demarcate when the old world ends and the new world begins. The plan is so ambitious that subsequent news out of France announcing the end of gas and diesel vehicle sales in that country by 2040 seemed beside the point.

That Volvo has stolen a march on the legacy automakers restores some lustre lost in the previous century — 1999 — when the Swedish car company was swallowed by Ford Motor Co. for $6.45 billion (U.S.). Volvo lovers wept. The brand had a singular reputation for safety, earned in large part through the company’s introduction of the threepoint seat belt in 1959. That advance was spurred not by regulation, which, actually, didn’t exist, but because it was the right thing to do. And the car company proved its socially conscious bona fides by giving away the design to other car companies for free. Any child of the ’60s might reflect: did the family car even have a two-point lap belt? And if, so, was it ever used? Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile wasn’t published until 1965.

The Volvo brand too had a distinctive style reputation, not least the boxy but arguably beautiful 200 series. This includes the family 240, which is tank-like. Not for nothing is she referred to far and wide as “The Lead Sled.” And yet, she’s agile. (Volvo aficionados may be more likely to fondly reminisce about Simon Templar’s dead sexy P1800.)

Canada has a distinct relationship with the Volvo marque. Car buffs will recall the Nova Scotia years. Volvo commenced car assembly in Dartmouth in 1963, later moving production to Halifax. There were substantial inducements to woo the company to our shores, and we could get into a long discussion about tariff elimination. But we won’t.

In his book The New Domestic Automakers in the United States and Canada, A.J. Jacobs states that the Volvo was “the first vehicle produced in Canada or the United States by a non-North American company in the post-World War II era.”

The ’60s-era “Now Made in Canada” advertising pushed the “Overbuilt to Take It!” branding line. “It” being Canadian winters.

It also seems surprising that only in 1998, the year before the Ford takeover, did Volvo cease Canadian production. Nova Scotia’s Museum of Industry website features an adorable four-door Volvo sedan called “The Canadian,” black with red interior and red-centred hub caps, presented to the province’s ministry of trade and industry not long after production commenced. The car is slightly bug-eyed, with fetching grille work.

What’s to be said about the years of Ford ownership? Little. Volvo owners grumbled that the car’s manufacture simply wasn’t up to its legendary standards. The marriage was ill-suited to both parties — the power of convergence never did pay off — and after the financial crisis Volvo was being shopped.

Bought up by China’s Geely Motors in 2010 for $1.8 billion, the future looked no brighter. Skeptics expected a continued deterioration of the automaker’s reputation and, the worst outlook, its demise, a view supported by sliding U.S. sales. But CEO Hakan Samuelsson seems to have been given the freedom in Gothenburg to pursue his goal of creating a global premium car company. The announcement that Volvos will be battery or hybrid powered only in just three years time is a cornerstone of that. The name Polestar will become more familiarized, as Volvo rolls out racy high-performance vehicles under that marque. Imagine Simon Templar going electric.

Volvo’s surprise announcement naturally raised all sorts of questions about Tesla. But this is bigger. It’s an industry challenge really. Volvo’s new branding cry: game on. jenwells@thestar.ca

Volvo’s announcement naturally raised all sorts of questions about Tesla. But this is bigger