Do a search today for “Volvo” and “electric car” and you’ll be swamped with hits that declare the Swedish car maker will swear off traditional gasoline and diesel engines from 2019.
And what a heart-warming thing that would be. It would make it the first well-known premium carmaker to cross over to the bold new world of zero emissions.
Sadly, it’s not quite true.
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Volvo did put out a statement today and backed it up with a live-stream press conference, to announce its future electrification strategy.
“This announcement marks the end of the solely combustion engine-powered car,” Volvo CEO Håkan Samuelsson said today.
“Volvo Cars has stated that it plans to have sold a total of 1 million electrified cars by 2025. When we said it, we meant it. This is how we are going to do it.”
Yet not a single word of that statement delivered a timetable, a path or a strategy to kill off internal-combustion engines.
Instead, it simply said that it would have two new chassis architectures for every car and SUV it will launch from 2019 onwards. These new architectures will support three different electrified powertrains: a gasoline engine with a 48-Volt mild-hybrid system, a plug-in hybrid (PIH) system (with both gasoline and electric motors) and a full battery-electric (BEV) system.The first two levels of electrification would be available in all Volvos, while BEV power will be the high-priced option on only three Volvo-branded cars .
It confirmed five new battery-electric cars – the three from Volvo, plus two high-performance, 500km Polestar cars – would hit its showrooms between 2019 and 2021.
“We will start (BEVs) from a medium range to medium power going up to a high performance and high range for a premium customer,” Samuelsson said.
“As long as the platform lives, at the end of the life-cycle, the pure battery-electric vehicles might well be the majority of the mix,” he claimed.
Volvo’s initial BEV window, from 2019 to 2021, straddles a critical year for the European car industry. In 2020, European will enact EU 7, an enforceable law that will limit the continent’s average new-car CO2 emissions at 95 grams per kilometre. It’s this law, rather than any threat by Tesla’s loss-making, rounding-error volumes, that is driving them all into electrification.
No European carmaker believes it can hit the EU 7 target with internal-combustion engines alone and they’re decreasingly convinced about the after-treatment costs of keeping diesels clean. So electrification is the only game in town.
Volvo’s announcement was pitch-perfectly crafted to position it as a responsible carmaker and the first established premium brand to transfer itself across to the powertrains of tomorrow.
Except it isn’t. Volvo was the first premium carmaker to announce it, couched in precisely these narrow terms.
Anyone who wants to sell cars in Europe will transfer themselves across to electrification in the 12 months either side of 2020. They have no choice. Any of the major European premium brands launching a BEV next year is likely to be doing so in the hope of avoiding clogged development and production pipelines in 2020 and/or bottle-necked production-cycle changeover windows in 2026-2028.
Now, Volvo’s target is to sell a million electrified cars by 2025, but there’s a lot to be careful of in that wording. “Electrified” doesn’t mean “Electric”, and that’s the biggie. Secondly, it wants to sell a million electrified cars by 2025. That’s a million in total, counting from now, not a million per year. Thirdly, when Samuelsson used the word “solely”, he meant its future internal-combustion engines would be helped by a soothing electrical hand, not be shoved out of the engine bay altogether.
Even the plug-in hybrid isn’t necessarily all-new technology. It’s a development of the 400-Volt system it already uses in its 90-series models, though Volvo prefers to call it a “twin engine” rather than a plug-in hybrid.
“The twin engine, the plug-in hybrid system, the 400V system, it is the continuation of what we have today that gives better fuel economy and better efficiency and can drive electrically for a certain range,” Henrik Green, Senior Vice President Research & Development, said.
When you look at it like that, Volvo’s announcement was not especially eye-popping.
In fact, as Green admitted, industry-standard seven-year production cycles mean it will phase out the last of its pure internal-combustion models by 2023 or 2024, at the earliest. Not internal-combustion models, mind you, but non-electrified internal-combustion models, including diesels.
“All cars released after 19 will have this powertrain and of course we will sell already homologated cars after that. Of course there will be an overlap,” Green said.
“The overlap is difficult to say. Typically, the life cycle of a car is seven years, so maximum of five years we will basically be on the new platform.”
That’s not to throw shade at Volvo, but at the journalists who have misrepresented or misunderstood what Volvo’s announcement really means.
“The first level still includes an internal-combustion engine (ICE) and only the third level has no ICE,” Samuelsson confirmed.
“We have an ambition to be fastest in this transition (to electrification). We want to be the first company to clear this, and we want to do this change. It’s a very decisive decision.
“Right now we have about 15 percent twin engines (plug-in hybrids) in the 90 series. That’s starting to add up to the one million by 2025. By 2025 we will have a significant share of the electric market. One million is not an exaggeration.”
Samuelsson himself wouldn’t be drawn on what the sales split would be between the “new” Volvo’s mild-hybrid, plug-in hybrid and BEV powertrains, much less when Volvo’s last internal-combustion engine would roll out of a factory.
Instead he diverted, suggesting the timing of the death of the internal-combustion engine would be entirely “up to the customer to decide”.
Volvo has two different sizes of scalable chassis architecture to electrify its next-generation cars: the scalable product architecture (SPA) and the compact modular architecture (CMA). They’re both designed to be built in shorter and longer wheelbases and widths, taller for SUVs, lower for sedans, and to swallow different sizes of battery packs and drive systems, but the volume end, the lower-priced end, will use 48-Volts in concert with internal combustion engines.
A typical 48-Volt system takes the energy generated during braking and turns it into electrical power, which it punches in to the engine via a belt-driven motor-generator. The motor-generator usually replaces the traditional starter motor and while it won’t push the car alone, it lends the internal-combustion engine a helping hand in moments of high-fuel consumption.
The layout is not new (hence “typical”). General Motors did it with Saturn back in 2007, while Honda replaced the torque converter on the 1999 Insight with an electric motor, but both did it without the benefits of 48 Volts.
Audi debuted one of its 48-Volt systems in the SQ7 last year and will show off a different 48-Volt system at the A8’s unveiling next week. The A8 system, Audi explained, will save about a gallon of gasoline every 340 miles, and it’s headed into every future Audi.
Mercedes-Benz will debut its latest system at the driving launch of the S-Class next week and it has developed an entire range of new in-line engines around the system. It, too, will work its way throughout the family.
It’s not just for premium cars, either. Brand CEO Herbert Diess last month confirmed Volkswagen plans to use a 48-Volt mild-hybrid system in its 2018 Golf Mark VIII. Renault goes one better, offering the system today on the Euro-focused Scenic people mover.
Both Volvo and Volkswagen insist the system will pull the gasoline engine’s fuel consumption down to at least diesel levels, without its NOx emission problems. It’s also, by some margin, the cheapest of Volvo’s three electrified powertrain systems to build, which is why it expects it to be the most popular, which is hardly incentivizing the death of the internal-combustion engine.
“The new basic model will be this mild hybrid and in the first years that will be where we have the highest volumes. In the PIH and the BEV, I would be less secure about making a prediction,” Samuelsson admitted.
“The 48V MHS with a three-cylinder petrol engine will be very cost efficient and CO2 efficient and a very attractive alternative to the diesel engine.”
“Diesel is very important for us reaching the 2020 CO2 levels of 95 grams. Long term, it will get more and more expensive with the after-treatment.”
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