► We speak to ex-CEO at the ES90 launch
► Why estates aren’t necessarily going to happen
► And why that’s okay
Volvo’s new ES90 is simultaneously the spiritual successor to the S90 saloon, and the closest thing to an estate Gothenburg has made in years. But it’s neither saloon nor estate, and nor is it a high-riding crossover – that’s the job of the EX90 SUV it shares a platform with.
We might want it to be a saloon and we might want that saloon to spawn an estate variant, but Volvo says that just not the way the world works any more.
Our misty-eyed nostalgia for estates doesn’t materialise where it counts, on the balance sheet; estates just don’t sell in sufficient numbers. In an increasingly competitive market, Volvo must bank on what works: cars that combine everything we want, and models that are big on volume but low on cost.
‘It’s expensive to bring different models to the market, and it’s expensive to keep those models in the market, and it’s expensive to launch them from a marketing point of view,’ Volvo ex-CEO Jim Rowan explained to us the ES90’s launch. ‘This is why we started doing things like having a XC60 – it’s big selling car for us – rather than bring in a V90, for example. We’re making very conscious choices about where we want to play the game.
‘Where do we differentiate? SUVs with a nice, high ride height and very, very safe,’ he says. ‘We think we can protect that beachhead against the competition. It’s much easier than us becoming too distracted with too many models.
‘We’re a single brand company, Volvo, that’s it. And we do 30, 40, 60 and 90 – so we have a nice stack. We do SUVs, sedans and wagons at the moment, and the question is do we renew all of those?’
Design chief Jeremy Offer is very clear that the ES90 does not fit in with conventional idea about saloons. ‘It is in a class of its own. It’s got a long wheelbase, pushing those wheels into the corner of the car, short front and rear overhangs.’ But look again and you’ll notice a jacked-up ride height that puts it somewhere between a normal saloon and an SUV. Look harder still and you’ll discover it’s not a saloon at all – but a hatchback. ‘It is fundamentally a large sedan, but with these sorts of nuanced changes that we enable,’ Offers confirms.
‘This is about really fundamentally understanding our users and our customers,’ Offers says of the ES90. ‘I think part of the beauty of having a complete kind of paradigm shift in terms of how we think about the automotive experience,’ he adds. ‘It’s enabled us to sort of tear up the rule book a little bit, quite honestly.’
In the same way that consumer demand has blurred the lines between Apple’s laptops, tablets, and smartphones, and demand is now pushing Volvo’s designers to think past traditional body styles. So say goodbye to the classic Volvo saloon and estate.
The shift to electric powertrains is also a big factor in the change of body style, with the batteries under the floor. The 800-volt ES90 uses the same SPA2 platform as the EX90 and Polestar 3, but is first to get dual Nvidia Drive AGX Orin chips.
The ES90 is ‘the most powerful car we have ever created in terms of core computing capacity,’ says Anders Bell, Volvo’s chief engineering and technology officer. ‘This allows us to further raise the bar on safety and overall performance through data, software and AI.’
So committed is Volvo to its unified strategy that it’ll be retrofitting early ES90 and Polestar 3s with the new chips and installing them to later models from the off. The benefits are clear: Volvo can reduce hardware and software fragmentation and increase the efficiency of updates, just like Apple does with iPhones, iOS and M-processors.
Volvo has battened down the hatches and is sticking to its robust eight-model by eight-year strategy for the moment. And soon all EVs will be on the SPA2 and SPA3 platform, making the cars that do make it off the drawing board easier to update over the air.
Rowan’s pragmatic approach leaves less room for the competition to erode its market share or consumer base – but also less room for the estate we think we want. ‘We’re in a Darwinian event here where it’s tough, and there’s all these tariffs and stuff like that. So, the guys who figure out quicker are going to come out strong.’
Whether that direction will change under new CEO Håkan Samuelsson remains to be seen.