Volvo Cars to expand production following overwhelming demand for XC40

[AlexK]

Volvo press release just landed...

Volvo Cars to expand production following overwhelming demand for XC40

Volvo Cars, the premium car maker, has received almost 80,000 orders for the new award-winning XC40 small SUV and is expanding production in Europe and China in order to meet demand.

Production will be expanded at its Ghent manufacturing plant and Volvo Cars will add XC40 production capacity at its Luqiao plant in China in the first half of next year, underlining the popularity of this year’s European Car of the Year.

In addition, the company has also announced today that it will capitalise on the popularity of its new smaller models with the introduction of new models on its Compact Modular Architecture (CMA), replacing the current V40.

“The XC40’s success has surpassed even our highest expectations,” said Håkan Samuelsson, president and CEO of Volvo Cars. “The small SUV segment is the fastest-growing segment in the industry now, and with these additional CMA-based models we expect to benefit further from that growth.”

The coming new models based on CMA will include fully electric vehicles and will be sold globally in all major regions. More product details will be disclosed at a later stage.

The XC40 was launched in late 2017 to global acclaim and was the first ever Volvo to win European Car of the Year in March of this year.

The new XC40 is the first model on Volvo Cars’ new CMA vehicle architecture. Co-developed with Geely Holding, CMA provides Volvo Cars with the necessary economies of scale for this segment.

In March, Volvo Cars announced it will produce cars for its new sister brand Lynk & Co at the Ghent plant. Like the XC40, the first Lynk & Co model is based on CMA.

[pjm007]

Thanks Alex. Bit of a delayed response! Should have been announcing this back in March. No detail, so those waiting can’t tell if this will improve their lead time. From other posts, this is also unlikely to change the summer shutdown weeks.

[AlexK]

Indeed. Not to mention that if the hundreds (thousands?) of component suppliers can't increase production to match, we'll still be looking at shortages for certain specs.

[brumb]

Thanks for this Alex, much appreciated.

As pjm says, what would be helpful would be to see the impact of the announcement on current scheduled delivery times. I fear this will impact future orders rather than those already in the pipeline.

Irrespective of that; good work

[Boomer]

These are going to become as common as muck.... ONCE Volvo get their act together.

[xc40fun]

These are going to become as common as muck.... ONCE Volvo get their act together.

That's my worry now too