Volvo plans to alter the best way it names its automobiles beginning a brand new full-electric flagship that can debut subsequent 12 months.
As an alternative of carrying over the XC90 moniker, Volvo will deviate from utilizing letter and quantity mixtures for its Tesla Mannequin X rival.
“This automotive could have a reputation, extra like a [newborn] little one,” Volvo CEO Hakan Samuelsson stated throughout a presentation of the corporate’s EV-centric future on Wednesday.
Volvo needs half of its international gross sales — an estimated 600,000 — to be full EVs by 2025 and to be an electric-only model by 2030.
Samuelsson stated Volvo needs to debut a brand new title for the mannequin as a result of the crossover will:
- Debut a brand new platform.
- Solely be bought on-line.
- Offer lidar as standard to enhance security.
- Ultimately provide unsupervised driving in so-called Trip Mannequin in places the place laws permits the automotive’s know-how to take management.
- Supply bidirectional charging so buyer can feed electrical energy again to the grid in places the place that’s doable.
“Calling that only a new XC90 could be fallacious as a result of that is the actually a primary of its type,” Samuelsson advised Automotive Information Europe.
The brand new automotive can even showcase a sleeker exterior and extra spacious inside previewed by the Idea Recharge that Volvo debuted on Wednesday.
The prototype’s grille has a shield-like construction in addition to a brand new interpretation of Volvo’s Thor’s Hammer headlight design.
The celebs of the uncluttered inside are a 15-inch touchscreen and a floating display behind the steering wheel that can use Volvo’s newly developed working system. Volvo EVs can even have a centralized computing platform.
When requested how a lot of the Idea Recharge’s design language could be transferred to the brand new crossover Samuelsson was cautious: “Some concepts usually transfer up. I will not say extra.”
Volvo plans to disclose the automotive’s title when it debuts the manufacturing model of the crossover in 2022. Deliveries of the EV, which will likely be constructed on the automaker’s U.S. manufacturing facility in South Carolina, will begin in 2023.
Samuelsson stated Volvo’s new nomenclature will likely be prolonged to its the forthcoming wave of latest EVs underpinned by the second-generation of its Scalable Platform Structure, SPA2, and to a small electric crossover that can use the Sustainable Expertise Structure (SEA) the Swedish automaker helped dad or mum Zhejiang Geely Holding develop.
Volvo started launching one electrical automotive every year beginning in 2020 with the XC40 Recharge. The C40 was the automaker’s 2021 debut adopted by the flagship crossover due subsequent 12 months. Volvo hasn’t stated which EVs are deliberate for 2023-25, though the small mannequin must be within the combine together with a premium midsize SUV to succeed its No. 2-seller globally, the XC60..
In the meantime, Volvo confirmed there is not going to be a third-generation XC90 with a combustion engine or plug-in hybrid powertrain, however the present generations of every might even see updates.