Volvo Says Its Future Is Electric, Will Triple EV Production At Ghent Plant By 2022

Fueled by the strong growth of its Recharge models last year, Volvo has announced that it will triple its electric vehicle production at the Ghent plant in Belgium by 2022.

The factory makes the XC40 Recharge, which is the Swedish brand’s first EV, and the plug-in hybrid variant of the XC40, and will also assemble a new zero-emission Volvo, which will be based on the CMA architecture, starting later this year.

“Our future is electric and customers clearly like what they see from our Recharge cars”, said the car firm’s chief of global industrial operations and quality, Javier Varela. “As we continue to electrify our lineup and boost our electric production capacity, Ghent is a real trailblazer for our global manufacturing network.”

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In addition to the new EV that will enter production in Belgium in the coming months, Volvo will launch several other electric vehicles in the near future, as it wants half of its global sales to come from zero-emission models by 2025, with the rest being partially electrified.

Volvo sold 661,713 vehicles worldwide last year, a 6.2 percent drop over 2019 in the wake of the global pandemic, but it did record a 7.4 percent increase in the second half, with 391,751 units. The best-selling model was the XC60 with 191,696 units, followed by the XC40 and XC90, with 185,406 and 92,458 respectively.

Europe was the company’s biggest market, with 287,902 sales, 15.5 percent less than in 2019, while another 166,617 units were delivered in China and 110,129 in the United States, a 7.5 and 1.8 percent increase respectively.