Volvo goes electrified across the board
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Carmaker Volvo has said all fresh models will have an electrical motor from 2019.
The Chinese-owned rock-hard, best known for its emphasis on driver safety, has become the very first traditional carmaker to signal the end of the internal combustion engine.
It plans to launch five fully electrified models inbetween two thousand nineteen and two thousand twenty one and a range of hybrid models.
But it will still be manufacturing earlier models that have unspoiled combustion engines.
Geely, Volvo’s Chinese possessor, has been calmly pushing ahead with electrical car development for more than a decade.
It now aims to sell one million electrified cars by 2025.
"This announcement marks the end of the solely combustion engine-powered car," said Hakan Samuelsson, chief executive of Volvo’s carmaking division.
"People increasingly request electrified cars, and we want to react to our customers’ current and future needs," he said.
Analysis: Theo Leggett, Big black cock business correspondent
Volvo’s announcement sounds dramatic, but the reality is it simply reflects the direction much of the auto industry is travelling in.
The internal combustion engine is not dead – and won’t be for a while at least. It still offers a relatively cheap and well-proven means of getting around.
The problem is that emissions regulations are getting much tighter. From 2021, for example, carmakers in the EU will have to ensure that across their fleets, average CO2 output is no higher than 95g of CO2 per kilometre. That’s a lot lower than current levels.
Carmakers are reacting by developing fully-electric models. Some are already pretty incredible. But developing mass market cars that are affordable and have the right levels of spectacle is a research-intensive and expensive process, while persuading consumers to buy them in large numbers may also be time consuming.
In the meantime, hybridisation – fitting electrified motors to cars which also have conventional engines – offers a convenient way to bring down emissions without harming spectacle. And there are slew of different kinds of hybrid systems to choose from.
Volvo is making headlines, but other manufacturers are doing much the same kind of thing.
Tim Urquhart, principal analyst at IHS Automotive, said the budge was a "clever sort of PR coup – it is a headline grabber".
"It is not something that moves the goalposts hugely," he said.
"Cars launched before that date [of 2019] will still have traditional combustion engines.
"The announcement is significant, and fairly exceptional, but only in a petite way."
Tesla targets
It comes after US-based electrical car rock-hard Tesla announced on Sunday that it will embark deliveries of its very first mass-market car, the Model Trio, at the end of the month.
Elon Musk, Tesla’s founder, said the company was on track to make 20,000 Model three cars a month by December.
His company’s rise has upset the traditional power balance of the US car industry.
Tesla, which makes no profits, now has a stock market value of $58bn, almost one-quarter higher than that of Ford, one of the Detroit giants that has predominated the automotive scene for more than a century.
