Volvo Cars To Be All-Electric By 2030

Proposed combustion-engine bans in Europe and Japan by 2030 shouldn’t concern Swedish premium automaker Volvo too much, its CEO insisted.

They’ll only make electric cars (EVs) by then anyway, Volvo CEO and President Hakan Samuelsson told the Financial Times Future of the Car Summit today .

Samuelsson said he’d be shocked if Volvo wasn’t a pure EV maker by 2030, with the company already planning to be halfway there by 2025.

“I would be surprised if we wouldn’t deliver only electric cars from 2030,” Samuelsson told the summit.

While he hasn’t set a deadline on the delivery of Volvo’s last internal-combustion engine, it wants one in five of its sales this year to be electrified and half of them to be EVs by 2025.

The admission by Samuelsson would make it the second legacy brand after Bentley to become a full EV maker by 2030.

But Volvo has played cute before with the wording of its statements on EVs, leading people to conflate “electrified vehicle” with “electric vehicle”.

This time, though, it seems different.

“The way forward would be to have clear rules on when we need to exit the combustion engine,” he said.

“Once you have realized that the petrol and diesel engine are really not part of the future, it’s rather easy to see you have to move fast into the new world.”

Samuelsson isn’t fazed by cities like London and Paris announcing 2030 bans on combustion-powered cars, because he expects Volvo to already be there, and Volvo’s customers to come with it.

“Volvo will be very careful and deliver only electric engines before anybody has legal requirements for this,” he said.

Volvo is controlled by China’s Geely Automotive, along with Lynk & Co, Proton, Lotus and the London Electric Vehicle Company (LEVC).