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Welcome to the August 2025 MVS Newsletter. If you want to contact me, just reply to this email. If you have a forum account, thanks for being an MVS member. If you don’t, join the community. It’s fast and free.
My site turns 24 in September! I’ll post in the forum about that next month, a little retrospective.
Volvo Forum
- 850 T-5R talk » Adjusted for inflation, the cost would be well into the $80k range today(!)
- Volvo house » MVS member CIK7 is making a travel trailer out of the back half of a V70(!)
- Disaster strikes Jonboy74 » I’m devastated – 02 V70 2.4T engine is toast
- Buying a DiCE unit? » We’ve been discussing how to get a real (or merely functional) DiCE unit – and not get ripped off – for years
- For Life » If you don’t tire of “My Volvo Saved My Life” stories like I don’t, here’s another
- Softening S60 ride » it seems like it wouldn’t be difficult, but it somehow is
Volvo July Sales
Volvo Cars sold 49,273 vehicles globally in July, a 14% drop from the previous year. Electrified models (fully electric and plug-in hybrids) made up 45% of sales but fell 21% compared to last year. Fully electric vehicles accounted for 21% of sales, and plug-in hybrids comprised 23%.
XC60, the top-selling model, was the only year-over-year gainer with sales of 16,813 cars (2024: 15,577). The XC40/EX40 saw total sales of 12,087 cars (2024: 13,818) and the refreshed XC90 saw 7,266 cars (2024: 8,146).
[not great]
Volvo Has A EV Problem
I think Volvo has a EV problem. They painted themselves into a corner with the many years of pushing a future of full EV cars, both in terms of media chatter and in the enormous sunk cost of developing an EV range (EX30, EX90, ES90). Here in the US this flight got caught in two storms: first, the EV appetite was more or less sated by the time Volvo got to market with its EX30 and EX90 at the end of 2024. First adopters in the world of EV cars/SUVs bought in the late 2010s, and early 2020s, before Volvo got its footing.
Second, Tesla took all the oxygen out of the room. Tesla is an EV juggernaut, full stop. It sold more than seven million EVs worldwide since its inception, and over 633,000 EVs in the US in 2024. That’s more than 5x what Volvo sold of all types of vehicles, and that’s before Volvo sold even one EV in the US. Any oxygen still remaining was captured by GM (#2), Ford (#3), Hyundai (#4), Rivian (#5), BMW (#6).
Volvo woke up one morning in 2024 realizing they were not going to do well limiting themselves to EVs in just six years and ditched their 2030 all-EV goal. That was almost exactly one year ago. This goal was set in March 2021, a time when people were new-car-crazy because of COVID lockdowns and income burning holes in pockets, so in that light it’s perhaps easier to frame Volvo’s thinking.
Volvo pushed a lot of chips to the pot with EVs, a heavy bet, and it looks like they missed a sales cycle window. It’ll be an uphill climb from here with the small EX30 and expensive EX90.
There now is slack in the system because everyone who wanted an EV now has one, so given this unfortunate timing, it’s a good thing Geely (parent company) has deep pockets.
But it’s not the end of the book. Cars wear out — yes even EVs, even with their far fewer moving parts — and the industry will again lever up to the next sales shelf where Volvo can look to sell some EVs.
[In Volvo’s defense, I also thought EVs would sweep up sales as the decade moved into its second half, but in the US EV sales were still just 8.1% of new cars in 2024, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration]
QOTM
POTM
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