Volvo Cars: “Safety is our superpower” – electric automotive ambitions failed

The family-oriented and safety-obsessed Swedish automaker has been capable of gain large market share amongst young families over the course of its nearly 100-year history due to its low injury rate in collisions.

According to some reports, the flagship SUV XC90, which was launched in 2002, has never had a single Death of the motive force or passenger reported in Great Britain

But Vovlo Cars is at an inflection point as the worldwide auto industry grapples with falling demand for electric vehicles. With its share price falling to record lows and doubts looming over the corporate’s long-term strategy, the automaker is taking a really cathartic approach to marketing its unique selling point: safety.

Volvo is a “premium” brand, in other words a automotive manufacturer whose products customers are willing to pay a premium for. In addition to the increasing technical capabilities, this premium at Volvo is safety.

“You have your first child, you come home from the hospital and you start thinking a lot more deeply about safety,” Volvo CEO Jim Rowan told an audience during a matter and answer session at Volvo’s CMD.

“Safety is our superpower.”

Volvo has all the time emphasized that Volvo customers place the very best value on safety. Assets Rowan highlighted how Volvo differs from Polestar, the struggling electric automotive brand that’s closely linked to Volvo through joint majority shareholder Geely.

While Polestar’s unique selling point lies in its slogan “Pure progressive performance,” Volvo’s unique selling point lies in “safety, sustainability, human-centered design and family-focused customers,” said Rowan Assets.

Volvo is scuffling with a stagnant electric vehicle market. Several aspects, including falling consumer sentiment, the withdrawal of presidency subsidies and rising global tariffs, have contributed to the automaker’s stock falling to a record low since its IPO in 2021.

Volvo said on Thursday it could shift its predominant goal to increasing market share within the premium category relatively than increasing sales. It can be abandoning its promise to sell only electric cars from 2030 and lengthening sales of hybrids into the subsequent decade. In a stagnant market, the carmaker says the most effective solution to grow is to lure customers away from other brands.

In order to realize market share, Volvo places great emphasis on its safety promise.

As a part of its 90/90 presentation on Wednesday, where the corporate unveiled its latest hybrid XC90 and electric EX90, Volvo showed an incredibly dramatic industrial through which a pair have their first child and undergo the daughter’s early life.

Towards the top of the industrial, we cut to the expectant mother crossing the road when a careless Volvo driver almost hits her. However, she is stopped by the automotive’s sensor that detects an individual on the road. Volvo says within the industrial that sometimes the moments that do not occur are a very powerful of all.

Volvo’s safety bonus

Volvo’s safety ambitions are strengthened by artificial intelligence.

Anders Bell, Volvo’s chief engineer and technology chief, described how the carmaker visited accident scenes 50 years ago with tape measures to discover skid marks and other crash indicators that would higher inform Volvo’s design decisions. The group also brought in behavioral scientists to higher understand how people reacted within the run-up to crashes.

“Now we’re going to bring this superpower to that process,” Bell said of using generative AI in his cars, “that will enable real-time insights into the real world and significantly shorten our path to conclusions.”

On Thursday, Volkswagen announced that it’s expanding its partnership with Nvidia and is developing a core computing chip in collaboration with certainly one of the world’s largest firms.

The group’s technology partnerships, which also include Google, Qualcomm and Luminance, will provide drivers with more indicators to enhance lively safety, i.e. the prevention of accidents. Volvo is already a pacesetter in passive safety, which is designed to forestall injuries and deaths in collisions.

Bell says Volvo needs to provide its drivers more assurance that their data won’t be shared with third parties, suggesting that the corporate has struggled to acquire a sufficient dataset to advance its technological ambitions.

Changing landscape

Volvo’s latest deal with automation for safety detection follows several other firms working to automate their cars and reduce collisions. Tesla is leading the way in which in innovation on this area, but other automakers are quickly adopting similar technologies. While fully autonomous driving technology continues to be a hypothetical idea, it seems inevitable.

In a world where all cars are automated, safety could change into a default setting for all automotive brands and not a differentiator for Volvo.

However, Erik Severinson, Volvo’s chief strategy and product manager, said Assets that Volvo’s safety offering goes beyond automation.

“We will never compromise on passive safety or all the other things that make the car safer. I think safety will continue to be a brand differentiator, perhaps even more than performance,” Severinson said.

Long-term demographic changes are creating latest challenges for purchasers in several industries. In Japan, an early harbinger of the results of an economic slowdown, diaper maker Oji Holdings announced that it could switch to adult products in light of falling demand for kids’s diapers.

Across the Western world, individuals are also having fewer children, because of declining affordability of kids and changing cultural norms that lead women to have their first child later in life.

With Volvo cars placing such emphasis on latest families, the query arises as as to whether a changing environment could pose an extra threat to Volvo’s unique selling point when it comes to safety.

While Severinson considers the worldwide trend of declining birth rates to be worrying, he doesn’t consider that it can drastically affect Volvo’s position available in the market.

“I mean, your kids have friends,” Severinson said Assets that a decline in birth rates could hurt demand for its family-focused brand.

“Even if the number of children in society as a whole decreases, I think the number of families could stay relatively the same, just with fewer children. And then safety will be just as important, if not more so, for those families.”