When Does Volvo Plan To Be All Electric?
Volvo has invested $11 billion in electrified car technology and sold over 500,000 electrified models to date. Yet there has been little to no press around any plans of Volvo becoming an electric car brand, which they've stated is their goal. In mid-2018, when China banned all combustion engine cars, there was a brief moment of the press as Volvo moved production to fully electric vehicles and announced every first model of their new line would be electric. But this moment faded just as quickly as it arose.
They are not yet all-electric. The Volvo V40 is a hybrid (fuelling the electric motor with petrol), and the XC90 is an all-electric car. But that might change. Volvo has just announced it will develop a plug-in hybrid version of its P1800 sportscar, currently on sale in Europe, and has also said that it will come out with an all-electric car. That would be a new product entirely, at least in Volvo's history.
It's important to remember that Volvo isn't going to build electric cars just for the sake of it; the company wants them to work. It does not want to be another niche manufacturer that makes one or two cars and then goes out of business when the last one dies, as Tesla has been doing spectacularly well in the States. Like Toyota and every other automaker in the world, Volvo wants to sell lots of cars over a long period. It doesn't want to build electric vehicles just because they seem cool now; it wants only to make cars that people like enough to buy later on when they become more popular and cheaper.
The conventional view is that the car industry moves in decades and that by about 2020, all cars will be fully electric. The conventional view of the automobile industry is based on an analogy with other industries. The telephone industry moved from straight wire to cellular long before anyone knew how to make a car; we are now in the process of moving to fully electric vehicles.
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When the car manufacturer announced its first electric car in 2014, many industry experts were surprised by setting a sales target of 1 million electrified cars by 2025. To reach that goal, The Telegraph reports that Volvo has set a 10-year deadline to phase all internal combustion engines out of production, with the company's head of research & development calling it a "game-changer." It's easy to see why such big goals were set; just five years prior at the 2009 Paris Auto Show, the CEO had announced plans for Volvo to make only hybrid or 100% electric vehicles within two years--and said they would go 100% electric before 2020. The company ultimately settled for its standard hybrid technology, but Volvo is serious about making an all-electric lineup happen. When does Volvo plan to be all-electric? Only time will tell. Visit our dealership for more information on when Volvo Plan To Be All-Electric.
