For a decade, Volvo’s Berkeley County, South Carolina assembly plant has been producing vehicles that were created in Sweden for a global market. In the next half-decade, the company will begin producing a vehicle specifically designed for the U.S. market there.
Stopping himself before he divulged too much, Volvo Car CEO Håkan Samuelsson told Newsweek, “It will be a car, a bigger-size car for primarily for America. It’s a more family type of car… It should have room for big families and luggage and everything they bring along.”
He said that the model will be a hybrid. “Many places in America are still not ready for full electric cars. This would be a very good solution,” Samuelsson continued.
Other parts of the world will want the model, and Volvo will sell it to them, he said. The company will export the vehicle from the U.S., but not to China, the CEO said at the Volvo Cars South Carolina Assembly plant.
Volvo Car USA
“This factory is a strategic asset. We are building cars in America. This is also our, sort of, home market and we need to use the factory much more,” he said.
“The transition to electrification is proving to be more complex than simply making compelling battery electric vehicles available, and Volvo’s decision to expand capability with a product described as extended-range EV aligns with ensuring they meet consumer demand as much as regulatory demand,” Stephanie Brinley, associate director of AutoIntelligence at S&P Global Mobility, told Newsweek.
She continued, “Tariff decisions over the past several years have thwarted the company’s original intent for using the plant to source more export, including to mainland China, and it is currently underutilized.”
The introduction of the new hybrid model, in 2029, does not mean that Volvo is swaying from its all-battery-electric vehicle future plans. “If you look at the strategy of our company, we believe we will come out stronger as an electric company after this transformation,” Samuelsson said.
“Four years ago, I thought the electrification would be faster. We need to be a bit more pragmatic and cannot just turn the company into 100 percent [battery-electric vehicle] company,” the CEO said.
The company had expected to need hybrid models until 2030, but now it’s looking at a fresh set of hybrid vehicles needed for a decade beyond that, through 2040. They’re calling those models second-generation hybrids, and those models are designed to appeal to buyers in areas where battery-electric vehicle adoption is slower – America, Eastern and Southern Europe and inland China.
“We need to transform fast,” Samuelsson continued. “This is the best way to not to be [a] victim of reconciliation that very likely will happen. Not everybody will be successful.”
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