Inquisition He helped draft Volvo’s masterplan
The exec who co-wrote Volvo’s turnaround plan is now changing the way we buy cars
It’s a great automotive turnaround story: how did Volvo go from being ooaded by Ford to posting its best-ever half-year financial results last month? Lex Kerssemakers has the answers. In fact, the Dutchman could write the company’s history, having served Volvo around the globe for more than 30 years.
He’s been on Volvo Car’s executive management team since 2004, and became the first non-Swede to run product planning. That was his role when the 2008 financial storm broke. ‘We were very vulnerable. Ford was going to sell us,’ Kerssemakers recalls. ‘We had no future engines, old cars – Volvo was almost gone. We had to replace a portfolio and modernise it.’
In 2010, the year Chinese automotive group Geely took over Volvo, global volume was 373,525 units. Volvo practically matched that total in the first six months of 2019 alone, selling 340,286 cars. That growth curve started with the strategy Kerssemakers helped write, covering platforms and powertrains.
SPA, the Scaleable Product Architecture, was conceived to underpin the company’s flagship XC90 SUV, but with su¢cient flexibility to spawn the V90 estate and S90 saloon, plus the smaller 60 series offering the same three body styles. So far, so similar to the strategy used by the German premium brands. Then Kerssemakers presented a more radical idea: that new Volvo engines would be pegged at four cylinders. ‘I got tomatoes
thrown by the engineers when we said we would stop five- and six-cylinder engines!’
There were question marks over whether a turbocharged four-cylinder would have the grunt to haul an XC90 seven-up, but it was a good call given the environmental push to downsize engines, and fitted with Volvo’s reputation for social awareness. It saved money too. And when a similar call had to be made on going electric at full speed, the engineers’ mindset had changed. Diesel is also part of the shake-up: this year’s diesel engine family is the last of its kind, and there’s no diesel S60.
Once the product plan was in place, the brand strategy followed. ‘We wanted to be genuinely Scandinavian, not copy and paste the others,’ the 59-year-old explains. ‘Of course we have the safety value. But don’t underestimate the role of design, that’s one of the main buying reasons: we made that transformation to intuitive, clean design.’ In addition to Thomas Ingenlath’s muscular, unfussy exterior designs, the interiors stand out for their pale woods and light colour options, and Volvo was early to follow Tesla’s lead with a large digital screen to operate multiple functions.
The range has been expanded with the XC40, which uses the smaller CMA architecture co-developed with Geely. The V40 hatch, the last of the old Volvos, recently ceased production, and won’t be replaced by a trad VW Golf rival. There are, he says,