Volvo ditches gas-only vehicles.
Beginning in 2019, Volvo plans to cease production of vehicles solely powered by the internal combustion engine. This makes Volvo the first major automaker to move entirely to a "hybrid" business model -- at least as far as passenger cars go. The company did not mention any major changes to its commercial truck lineup.
When asked about the decision, Volvo CEO Hakan Samuelsson said that their decision to elect some form of electric propulsion was due to customer demand. Meanwhile, Sam Abuelsamid, senior analyst for Navigant Research, expects other luxury brands to follow suit.
“I think we’ll probably see most of the premium brands do the same thing in roughly the same time frame,” Samuelsson told
The Washington Post. “More high-volume mainstream brands will be a little slower.”
Though five fully electric Volvos are planned to launch between 2019 and 2021, much of the hybrid technology will be small 48-volt systems used to make vehicles approximately 10 to 15 percent more efficient. There's also a possibility we'll see the old hot rodder's trick of using electricity to drive vehicle systems that run off the engine's drive belt (i.e., water pumps and oil pumps, among others) become more popular. Abuelsamid reports that these improvements can make the vehicle two to three percent more efficient -- or enough for a vehicle that gets 30 miles per gallon to get anywhere between 36 and 39 miles per gallon.
The improvements in efficiency will help the brand weather increasingly strict efficiency regulations in Europe, and since it's expensive to build specific cars for specific markets, the tech will almost certainly transcend the European market.
As for the fully electric/hybrid vehicle market, Abuelsamid predicts that the sale of these vehicles will rise from about 3.7 million vehicles in 2018 to more than nine million in 2025, and with Volvo reporting that they have the technology to make a fully electric car 500 kilometers or 310 miles on a single charge, perhaps Tesla isn't as far ahead as Wall Street thinks.
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