Few company bosses get a second chance to show what they’re made of. Perhaps only Apple’s totemic Steve Jobs ever truly returned to a role at the top of a major corporation and made an even bigger success of things the second time around.
Hakan Samuelsson has that chance. Last year, the 74-year-old from Motala in southern Sweden was brought back to the chief executive role at Volvo, which he previously held between 2012 and 2022.
Samuelsson returned to a company in no little turmoil. His successor – and now his predecessor too – Jim Rowan, had pushed Volvo down a route of basing new cars on software rather than hardware.
That’s a route many car makers are taking now, but Volvo fumbled the move. Significant delays and reliability problems with both the software and hardware of Volvo’s all-electric EX30 and EX90 models undermined Rowan’s position. With Volvo posting a rare operating loss, he was out and Samuelson was back in, announced as returning chief executive on a two-year contract. To steady the longship, as it were.
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Now, Samuelsson is almost halfway through his second stint and has just presided over the launch of a hugely important new model – the Volvo EX60, an all-electric SUV that sits in the same corner of the market as the company’s best-seller, the hybrid-engines XC60.
“Some years ago, we made a very decisive and brave decision for the company,” Samuelsson told The Irish Times. “We decided that the future of Volvo cars must be electric and today can confirm that we are even more convinced that this is the right answer, not only to the climate challenge, but also to our customers’ expectations of getting better, more attractive cars."
However, Volvo has wavered, as have many car makers, on making the move to electric-only power. With some markets around the world still proving resistant to EVs, Volvo has hedged its bets by refreshing older hybrid-engined models such as the XC60 and XC90 and keeping them on sale alongside newer electric models.
Samuelsson, though, is convinced that this is a temporary measure. “The XC60 will remain on sale for as long as it’s needed, as a sort of bridge solution”, he said. “We are dogmatic in saying that we are full speed ahead towards electrification, but we are less dogmatic in setting a date.”
Volvo – and its sister company Polestar, which makes only electric cars with no combustion engine models – was almost alone in resisting the EU’s move to water down its planned 2035 ban on combustion engine sales. Samuelsson says he didn’t see the logic in slowing down the process of taking the carbon out of motoring.
“I think it’s not so important if it’s 2030 or 2035 because as long as there is a credible limit where you need to be electric, then you go back to the laboratories and say, ‘well, now we have to develop this’. But if you lose credibility and say it could be 2035, but let’s see, and we’ll decide later on. Then I think you will go back into the combustion engine laboratory and work. So it has to be a credible milestone.”
Samuelsson adds: “We are keeping our hybrids as a bridge solution so that we can be flexible. So maybe the overlap between hybrids and electrics goes on for a bit longer, especially in the US. But why shouldn’t Americans switch to electric? I think it’s probably the best market in the world for electrification.
“They live in their suburbs with their three-car garages. Isn’t that perfect? You have the cars in your own garage charging overnight. So I think it would be more difficult for someone living in a European downtown area. So electrification will happen long-term. We want to be leaders in that.”
Samuelsson’s predictions for electric motoring fly in the face of doubts expressed in other quarters. He quotes a claim that the market for EVs across Europe rose by 27.5 per cent in 2025. “How can anyone complain about a 27.5 per cent growth rate? Certainly, we are not.”
His EV bullishness is bolstered by a claim that Volvo is one of the first car makers to be able to build and sell an EV at the same or similar price to its hybrid models, and critically at the same or similar profit margin.
“The EX60 is at margin parity and I’ve not heard many others talking about this,” said Samuelsson, who was in quietly combative form during our chat, reckoning that the EX60 is the car to push Volvo past BMW in the sales charts, thanks to its potential 810km range and ultra-fast charging.
“We are already outselling BMW and Mercedes in the plug-in hybrid segment with the XC60 and we are number two overall in that segment, only behind the VW Tiguan. So, why not?”
If the EX60 manages to outsell the BMW iX3 and the Mercedes GLC EQ, that will be job done for Samuelsson, who is pinning his hopes on this new EV to bring sales growth back to Volvo.
That stalled last year, both on the impact of US tariffs and on software bugbears with the EX30 and EX90.
So, how can potential EX60 buyers be convinced that the same problems won’t affect Volvo’s new software-focused EX60? “The problems with those cars were mainly down to the software,” Samuelsson said. “And the truth is that the EX60 uses the same software, but this is a good thing because now we have been through the pain to get it all right. We have to have good software – it’s the only way to achieve scale.”
As well as fixing the software, he has led a drive to simplify the EX60 as much as possible. With that in mind, expensive autonomous assistance features such as LIDAR (laser and radar sensors in one unit) have been ditched (they’re being removed from the bigger EX90 too). Volvo is now also embracing “gigacasting” – a process, pioneered by Tesla, that sees large sections of the car’s body and chassis made in singular large pieces, rather than pieced together from smaller components.
The practice has occasionally raised the hackles of insurance companies, who worry about having to pay to replace larger sections when repairing a car after a crash, but it certainly contributes to the EX60’s profitability.
To its carbon footprint too, which is claimed to be as small as that of the tiny EX30 electric crossover. It helps, from a local perspective, that the EX60, and its batteries, are all made in Sweden, rather than one of the further-flung outposts of the Geely Group, the giant Chinese car conglomerate that owns Volvo.
That ownership raises the question of value. Geely is launching its own-brand cars in Europe now, at some arrestingly low prices (although Irish sales are not yet confirmed). That means Volvo will have to work very hard indeed to maintain its premium status if batteries and electric motors are going to be shared – however distantly – with bargain-basement Chinese brands.
While Volvo pushes ahead with electrification, it is taking a slightly softer stance on, oddly for this brand, safety. In his previous stint as chief executive, Samuelsson made the promise that by 2020, there would be no fatal accidents for occupants of Volvo cars.
That promise has been, in part, fulfilled; it is estimated that since the model’s introduction in 2003, no one travelling in a Volvo XC90 has been killed in an accident. However, Samuelsson is now taking a more realistic tone on the ultimate limits of vehicle safety: “The vision is that no-one should die, but I think we will never be able to prove that in a mathematical sense.
“But it comes down to what you can do. Many people are killed because they fall asleep and run off the road, or they make dangerous right turns. We have developed technology that prevents you from having an accident in those situations.
“So what remains now? Everything that is driver behaviour-related. People are still drinking alcohol and driving, and they (boys) drive much faster than they should.”
Samuelsson has a year left, perhaps, to pull Volvo up to parity with its German rivals. He may well do so, but it seems less likely that he’ll be able to save drivers from their own bad habits in that same timeframe.
