Volvo’s boss explains his electric vision
Boss Håkan Samuelsson admits Volvo was late to EV. But now watch him clean up. By Gavin Green
Volvo’s first pure electric car, the new XC40 Recharge, may have been a long time coming. It’s arrived more than seven years after the Tesla Model S and six years after BMW’s i3, and won’t actually go on sale until late 2020. But now Volvo’s electric floodgates are set to open. No mainstream car maker is more electro-ambitious than Volvo. Over the next five years, Volvo will launch a fully electric car every year. By 2025, half of all Volvos sold should be pure electric cars, according to Håkan Samuelsson, Volvo’s CEO.
Volvo is already a leader in plug-in hybrids. Ten per cent of all the cars it sells now have a plug – way more than its German rivals – and every model has a plug-in hybrid option. By the end of 2020, 20 per cent of all its cars sold should be chargeable hybrids, says Samuelsson, who spoke to CAR exclusively in Gothenburg.
‘We look inside the computers of these plug-in cars and we find on average our customers drive them 50 per cent of the time in electric mode. If 20 per cent of the cars we sell are these cars, that’s the same, from an environmental prospective, as selling 10 per cent of our range as full electric.’
He admits, in electric cars, Volvo is ‘years behind Tesla. If you could wind back time, we would probably have done electric cars faster. Five years ago, we argued it would be dicult to sell an electric car because of the lack of infrastructure, so we concentrated on selling plug-in hybrids. And that we have done very successfully.’
Its electrification drive included a commitment in 2017 that every new Volvo launched from 2019 would have an electric motor. ‘That includes the mildest of electrification, mild hybrids. So it’s a bit exaggerated but we wanted to give a clear signal to battery suppliers and people investing in the charging infrastructure. As a statement, it worked. We all need to
HÅKAN SAMUELSSON
be clear what we want. We’ve made it clear the future for Volvo is electric.’
Volvo has also launched an upmarket electric-car wing, Polestar. Its first fully electric car, 2020’s Polestar 2, uses similar mechanical components and the same platform as the XC40 Recharge. All future Polestars will be pure electric.
‘If you could wind back time we would probably have done electric cars faster’