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By 2030, Volvo plans to stop selling cars that run on fossil fuels. The company wants to only sell electric vehicles that can only be purchased online.
“There is no long-term future for cars with an internal combustion engine,” Henrick Green, Volvo Chief Technology Officer, said.
The carmaker wants electric cars to be half of its sales in 2025 and the other half hybrid cars. The company has lofty ambitions, considering it only has two fully electric vehicles. Anderson Guzman from Yahoo Finance Live talked with Volvo’s President and CEO, Anders Gustafson to discuss Volvo’s future and the timeline for the automaker.
“It’s really following our cycle plan and our priorities in the company. We have decided to put all our efforts into a growing segment, and that is electrification, and also we see a by far higher demand and also we see support for electrification, especially in US,” Gustafson said. “It’s kind of a combination of first of all, of course, you need to have a plan for this and take it in steps. We started last year with a very aggressive PR strategy focused on the West Coast, where we had the highest demand. And just after six months, we found out that the demand is really in all the three regions we have in US, both the West Coast and the southern region and Northeast. So we see by far higher demand. That was one of the ingredients in being so bold with numbers.”
The company is looking to recruit colleagues and resources.
“Our plant in Charleston is just building a great sedan right now, but the biggest kind of locomotive in the US, Us markets the XC90, and that is going to be produced in Charleston. So we would go for quite low production capacity to highest capacity ever on the US market, and therefore my answer is that we need to recruit more colleagues, more resources, but of course, we need different competencies, and that’s the reason we have to have our own university and also the reason why we educate our partners so they can take the next step together with us,” Gustafson said. “If we take about in numbers, in Charleston, where we have our plants, we need to double our size of the operation right now. It’s really triple the size of the operation. From our headquarter point of view, it’s of course, more digital competencies that we need. And then we have the software development on the West Coast, where we find it’s a little bit easier to recruit right now.”
Volvo isn’t the only carmaker transitioning to electric vehicles, Ford announced that it plans to sell only electric vehicles in Europe by 2030. General Motors wants to sell emission-free vehicles by 2035.
