Volvo admits electric transition has been slower than hoped as first EX60 rolls off the line

Nine years after Volvo lit the touchpaper on the legacy industry’s electric revolution, the Swedish marque has admitted that the zero-emission transition has not moved at the pace it once promised.

Speaking as the first production-spec EX60 rolled off the line at the company’s Torslanda plant in Gothenburg on Tuesday, chief executive Hakan Samuelsson conceded that the landmark pledge he made in 2017, to build one million electrified Volvos by 2025, has been comfortably missed.

Back then, Samuelsson’s commitment made headline news and positioned Volvo as the first traditional manufacturer to call time on the pure combustion engine. True to his word, the Gothenburg firm has not launched a single petrol- or diesel-only model since. Yet the numbers tell their own story. Volvo shifted 710,000 cars in 2025, of which just 323,000 were fully electric or hybrid. Even folding in stablemate Polestar, spun out of the Volvo group in 2019, lifts the combined total only to 383,000. More than half of the cars wearing the iron mark last year still relied on a combustion engine.

“Our strategy has been to be a first transformer to electrification,” Samuelsson said at the Torslanda launch. “We have always seen it as an opportunity and not a threat. We wanted to be active rather than reactive. We wanted to go electric rather than be forced to do it.”

Now 75 and back in the hot seat after a spell away from the company, Samuelsson cut a more measured figure than the executive who once electrified the industry with his ambition. “We were ambitious and optimistic. We still are,” he said. “Things change and there have been variations to the plan, but we have never deviated from what we set out in 2017.”

He laid part of the blame at the door of policymakers, pointing to the repeated shifting of deadlines for the ban on new petrol and diesel sales, and the “lack of concrete targets” for rolling out public charging infrastructure across key markets. “Maybe we overestimated the requirements of regions like the American Midwest or Eastern Europe,” he added. “Maybe we should have understood that some regions would need a bit more time.”

That caution now extends to Volvo’s own showroom plans. Samuelsson admitted “a reluctance” to restate the company’s previous commitment to become an all-electric brand by 2030, signalling a more pragmatic line from the Geely-controlled manufacturer. “Let us see where the transition takes us,” he said. “We will not mandate our customers and we will continue to offer bridge solutions for those who cannot charge so easily, and that is why we have plug-in hybrids. It will be a flexible transformation.”

If Volvo’s broader ambitions have been tempered, the EX60 is intended as a statement of intent. The battery-electric counterpart to the XC60, comfortably Volvo’s best-selling model, the new SUV is claimed to deliver more than 500 miles on a single charge, a figure that would make it best-in-class at a point when range anxiety remains one of the sharpest barriers to mainstream electric adoption.

For Sweden, the significance runs deeper than one model. Volvo is roughly the size of Britain’s Jaguar Land Rover but carries disproportionate economic weight in a smaller nation, and the Torslanda site and Gothenburg headquarters are being pitched as a pan-European hub for the design, development and production of the brand’s next generation of EVs.

“Today is an important milestone for our company and for Sweden as a whole,” Samuelsson said.

Volvo may no longer be on course to hit the number it set itself in 2017. But as the first EX60 glides silently off the Torslanda line, its chief executive is betting that the direction of travel, even if slower than he once imagined, is still the right one.