Volvo boss Hakan Samuelsson awarded top honour at 2020 Autocar Awards

Samuelsson decided Volvo had to be “human centric”, with safety and sustainability at its core. “If you looked at society, you could see the wind blowing in that direction,” he says. “We began to major on it. Safety of families became important and a part of that was being bold enough to introduce a speed limit. [All Volvos are now governed to 112mph.] And sustainability matched that. For many people, guarding the planet is a part of guarding their families.”

Virus effects notwithstanding, Samuelsson is confident of maintaining Volvo’s progress: “If sustainability continues to be important, we ought to be able to keep growing more or less as we have. At 10% a year, we’ll be much bigger in five years. But there’s more to this than just saying we’ll do a million cars in two or three years: we must do what is right.” Part of Volvo’s recipe is to accelerate electrification to cover a slow adoption of battery EVs so that, by 2025, 50% of Volvos will be PHEVs and the rest pure EVs. Surely such an increase will be bad for profits, I suggest, given that no one seems able to make them pay at present.

Samuelsson bats this away. “The cost of today’s EV won’t be the same tomorrow,” he insists. “Batteries will fall in price and the price of conventional cars will go up. As ever, profitability is geared to how attractive your products are and there’s no doubt our electric cars will be really attractive. They’ll have the sustainability thing we’ve talked about, and then there’s the driving experience. It’s very difficult to find any drawbacks with that.

“Of course, we still need to improve EV range. You should be able to drive eight hours, then stop to recharge your car as you recharge your body. But EV ranges will improve rapidly. In five years, experts say range will double, and it will happen. Many more brains are concentrating on battery chemistry than ever before.”

Samuelsson admits to seeing plug-in hybridisation as “a sort of bridging technology”, especially useful where electric car infrastructure proceeds slowly. But as Volvo bolts towards its 50/50 EV/PHEV target around 2025, he believes the most serious danger lies in not transforming the company fast enough. “We need to go quickly,” he says, “and we need to bring our customers with us. The cars can be even more Volvo than they are now.”

Samuelsson agrees that in the changing world, the old-style infrastructure with which all car companies are saddled is a tremendous problem, although he insists an even bigger problem would be trying to create products that tried to preserve old technology: “Thirty or 40 years ago, there were shipyards where we develop cars today. It’s good for Gothenburg and for Sweden that the shipyards are not there any more. The people working there found new opportunities. In cases like this, I don’t believe we should protect old jobs. It’s better to help people develop new skills.”

Finding a future for Volvo’s engine plant is a prime example, Samuelsson believes. “We could keep our plant as it is but keep slimming it down as demand declines,” he says, “but that would not be very fulfilling for our people and we would lose our top talent. Maybe it’s better to form a new combined engine operation with Geely, building really fantastic hybrid engines for the whole group. If you’re early enough into a change like that, it’s possible your operation becomes interesting to other manufacturers. Let’s see…”

We turn to car sharing, and I expect Samuelsson to talk in generalities like all the others, especially with Covid-19 introducing such uncertainties. But as I’m learning from other topics, he has a clear view of this, too. “It’s shaky at present,” he admits, “a bit like electric cars 20 years ago. That was a great idea no one had mastered. But to me, you have to go back to the purpose of car sharing: if people in big cities want personal mobility without the hassle of owning a car and a garage, we should certainly offer it.” Volvo already has an experimental project in Stockholm called M.

“Plans so far have concentrated too much on short distances,” he explains. “We should stay out of Uber territory and go into conventional usage: a car for a day or a week. And make the system station based. If you allow people to drop the car anywhere, they’ll do just that. Collection costs will be huge. Any solution must both be profitable and provide customer value, not just geared to pumping cars out of a factory. We’re working on all this right now – a product and a procedure – and although we’re not quite sure we have a plan that’s absolutely clear and profitable, I’m optimistic.”

We conclude with a cheerful discussion about Samuelsson’s way of doing his job. He’s not a workaholic, he says (“to work well, you have to be smart”), and he tries to maintain a self-critical distance from the job (“this business is not perfect”). He particularly admires people who deliver big change in business – such as the creator of the Ikea furniture empire, who launched an entirely new idea unaided and from scratch. Now 68, Samuelsson extended his contract a few years ago – to 2020 – but shows no sign of leaving. In any case, he now has a new task: at the request of group chairman Li Shufu, he is starting to promote a merger that will turn Geely’s disparate corporate empire into a more cohesive automotive group.

“This makes it rather difficult to walk away,” he says with a grin. “Besides, I’m very lucky to have this job, the most exciting I’ve ever had. It’s a nice company with many good people, and as long as I feel like this – and they can stand me – I’ll stay a bit longer.”