Volvo

China’s protectionist laws are currently being relaxed when it comes to electric vehicles, but there are still some rigorous restrictions. For example, Chinese electric vehicles need to be powered by Chinese batteries.

A new report now shows that Geely found a workaround for Volvo’s electric vehicles by using Korean batteries made in China and the competition isn’t happy about it.
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Last year, Volvo announced that it was going “all electric“ by 2019, but it was actually only adding electric motors to each model.

Now, the company is clarifying its electrification plans with an announcement that they aim for 50% of sales to be ‘fully electric’ by 2025.
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Volvo’s recently unveiled Polestar 1 plug-in hybrid just got one step closer to reality, as they started taking pre-orders today and posted an online configurator allowing interested customers to check out the various color and wheel options available on the car.

We don’t yet know much about the buying process, as Volvo recently said cars from the Polestar brand would primarily be available as a “subscription service” (similar to a lease).  When pressed, Volvo stated that the Polestar 1 would target a price of “130-150,000 Euros” ($160k-$185k).

The deposit is $2,500/€2,500/20,000RMB and is fully refundable.  Pre-orders are available in 18 countries: China, United States, Sweden, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Portugal, Poland, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Canada.

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The first Volvo-made all-electric vehicle is apparently going to be the Polestar 2, but the Chinese-owned Swedish automaker now confirms that it will also launch an all-electric vehicle under its own brand soon.
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This week, Volvo is adding itself to the list of many truck manufacturers working on electric trucks.

The Swedish group says that it will bring the electric trucks to the road as soon as this year and start selling them next year.
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Polestar, Volvo’s performance brand recently relaunched as an all-electric brand, was off to a somewhat awkward but interesting start last year when it unveiled its first vehicle; the Polestar 1.

The car turned out to be a highly expensive plug-in hybrid, which the automaker quickly made sound outdated by announcing that they would bring an all-electric “Tesla Model 3 competitor” to production a year later.

In a new interview, the automaker’s CEO elaborates on those plans.
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Last month, Volvo’s Polestar was revamped as a performance electric car brand and it had a big launch – unveiling its first vehicle and announcing several more electric vehicles to come.

Now they announced that they started construction at their new factory in China where they will produce those cars.
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This morning Uber Technologies Inc. announced that they have agreed to purchase 24,000 Volvo XC90 plug-in hybrids from the Swedish company to for a fleet of driverless cars. Let that sink in for a moment, 24 thousand self-driving sports utility vehicles. That is 10,000 more than the number of yellow cabs in New York City.

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In a strange move today, Polestar, Volvo’s newly rebranded performance electric car brand, unveiled its first vehicle, a plug-in hybrid 2+2 seat Grand Tourer Coupé (PHEV), and quickly made it somehow outdated by announcing that all future Polestar cars will be all-electric (BEV).
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Volvo has yet to offer an all-electric vehicle or even to unveil one, but it announced today plans to only release electric vehicles starting in 2019.

But the news has some nuances and is being misreported, likely partly due to Volvo itself calling the announcement “Volvo Cars to go all electric“.
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Volvo, a Swedish automaker owned by China’s Geely, announced a new aspect of its plans to transition the company in the new electric revolution.

The company is launching its Polestar brand as a separate entity to build and sell performance electric vehicles. 
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Today, Volvo Chief Executive Officer Hakan Samuelsson said that the current generation of diesel engines will be the automaker’s last and that they will instead focus on electric vehicles.

And he also gave credit to Tesla for launching demand for electric vehicles, which actually plays right into the automaker’s mission.
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We were surprised when Lex Kerssemakers, CEO of Volvo Car USA, said that the Swedish automaker is aggressively pushing for its first long-range electric car to start between $35,000 and $40,000.

We now get more insights into how they could achieve that from a report stating that they plan to build the car in China and export it globally.
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Geely, China’s automotive giant, appears to want to get the most out of its acquisition of Sweden’s Volvo. After using some of the automaker’s engineering and manufacturing talent to set up Chinese operations, the company launched a new global brand, Lynk & Co, to produce hybrid and electric vehicles using Volvo’s own Compact Modular Architecture, on which the Swedish brand plans to launch its own first long-range EV by the end of the decade.

This week, we get a look at Lynk & Co second concept, which apparently has been unveiled early and ahead of the specs.
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Last month, Volvo confirmed that it plans for its first all-electric vehicle to come in 2019 with battery pack options up to 100 kWh.

Now the company adds that it plans to sell the vehicle in the US for an aggressive starting price of $35,000 to $40,000 with at least 250 miles of range.
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While Swedish automaker Volvo says that it is committed to the electrification of its vehicle lineup, we haven’t heard much about its plans beyond the announcement in 2015 that they are working on a new EV platform for 2019.

But this week at the SAE 2017 Hybrid and Electric Vehicle Technologies Symposium in San Diego, the company reaffirmed that the first all-electric Volvo car will be available in 2019 and confirmed that the platform could support battery packs up to 100 kWh.
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Tesla managed to hire a top engineering talent from the Swedish automaker Volvo. Electrek has learned that Anders Bell, Senior Director of Engineering at Volvo and the automaker’s ‘Head of Interior Engineering’ is joining Tesla in an equivalent role this month.
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Today, as part of its quest to have no serious injury or death in its new cars by 2020, Volvo again furthered its commitment to advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous drive (AD) with the creation of a new joint venture with automotive supplier Autoliv.

The new company will develop both ADAS and fully self-driving systems in order to be used in Volvo’s cars and sold to other automakers through Autoliv’s distribution partners.
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Lately, there’s been a lot of attention on the terminology used by automakers to describe their Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) currently available in their vehicles. It started with some people, including Consumer Reports, calling for Tesla to change the name of its ADAS program, the Autopilot, but the automaker refused and argued that the comparison with an airplane’s autopilot is appropriate.

Then Mercedes came under fire for a series of adverts describing its ADAS, the Drive Pilot, as a “self-driving car”. Consumer Reports again complained and Mercedes was quick to pull the ads.

Now we have another candidate for a similar problem: Volvo has been referring to its ‘Pilot Assist’ as “self-driving”.
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Tesla recently attracted some criticisms over its Autopilot system. There are primarily two camps when its comes to approaches to developing self-driving cars. Some companies are gradually releasing more and more advanced autonomous and semi-autonomous features (level 2) leading to a fully autonomous system (level 4), like Tesla’s Autopilot, and others, like Google, are aiming to only release a system once the technology is ready for a fully (level 4) self-driving car.

Among the criticisms, scientist Andrew NG said that it was “irresponsible” for Tesla to ship the Autopilot and BMW’s CEO compared the system to an unreliable app. Now it’s Volvo’s turn to go after Tesla’s Autopilot for similar reasons.
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Swedish automaker Volvo unveiled today two new concepts based on its Compact Modular Architecture (CMA). The new platform was developed to support all-electric and hybrid powertrains. The battery-powered version of the concepts are expected to achieve around 215 miles on a single charge.

The designs of the two new concepts are stunning and refreshing after what we have been seeing with EV concepts lately.
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