Dec. 14, 2025 | Bonus Episode: Volvo CEO Hakan Samuelsson’s vision for cars of the future

Good idea. Let's look into that. No, I think everything is possible. I think also of course from an economical point of view, from an environmental point of view, you would like to have a plug-in hybrid really being driven electric. Normally say 90% of the mileage should be done electric. I mean then it's good for the environment and it's a much more economical car to drive and you avoid this filling up. It's filled up automatically every day. But you don't need to be very nervous. Suddenly I will drive a bit extra here and then I'm left somewhere with a flat battery. Then the engine kicks in. So I think you should see the future of the plug-in car is more to have characteristics of an electric car but with a backup engine. For while the first generation was just a combustion car which had batteries, you could drive around some miles in the city and that is really not the same thing. So I think a car of the future should be experienced as electric. And Volvo we will have electric cars. I think long term they will be all electric. Short term as a bridge we need some electric cars with a backup engine and that's what we call the second generation plug-in cars. And that's something of course we're looking into exactly how we're going to fulfill that, but I think that will be absolutely cars attractive for us. And of course we have to secure that we can build them in the US as well.

Yes, longer range plug-ins, if you call it, that will definitely be something we need. I mean if you go back five years in time our ambition was to be all electric 2030 and basically have the plug-ins to cover that time till 2030 and then go all electric. I think what we now see is in some regions of the world we need this bridge to go maybe to 35, maybe coming close to 2040. So we need a second generation bridge, and they will be much more similar to an electric car but with a range extender. I mean there are various concepts how to have this extra range: you could have with or without mechanical drivetrain to the wheels. So that will come absolutely. But we will be ready 2030 with a really good lineup of all electric cars, and then we will have these backups. And for the backups, of course, as we don't have money without end, we will of course say how can we do this backup cars or second generation cars in a smart way. And then of course we will look into can we learn and take some parts from our Geely brothers, and in that respect, of course XC70 is one example. It could be sold in Europe, and for US we have to look twice and see how we can solve it there, but we have some ideas. So have something similar for America as well.