Volvo Cars is tripling electric car manufacturing capacity at its plant in Belgium, as it prepares to meet fast-growing demand for its ‘Recharge’ line-up of chargeable cars.
The capacity increase comes as Volvo Cars also reports its full-year sales results for 2020, which showed a strong growth in demand for the company’s Recharge models. The share of Recharge cars as a percentage of total sales more than doubled in 2020 compared with 2019. By 2022, electric car capacity at the plant in Ghent will have more than tripled from today’s levels and amount to around 60% of the plant’s total production capacity.
Ghent is currently preparing to take a second fully electric Volvo model, based on the CMA modular vehicle architecture, into production later this year — it already builds the XC40 Recharge, the company’s first fully electric car, as well as plug-in hybrid versions of the XC40.
Javier Varela, Head of global industrial operations and quality, said: “Our future is electric and customers clearly like what they see from our Recharge cars. As we continue to electrify our line-up and boost our electric production capacity, Ghent is a real trailblazer for our global manufacturing network.”
Volvo Cars is committed to becoming a premium electric car company, and in the coming years will launch several fully electric cars. By 2025, it aims for its global sales to consist of 50 per cent fully electric cars, with the rest hybrids.
While Ghent is the first of its global manufacturing network to start building fully electric cars, the company also has plans to increase electric car manufacturing capacity at its other facilities around the world.
Last month, Volvo Cars also announced it will assemble electric motors at its Swedish powertrain plant in Skövde, and plans to establish complete in-house e-motor production by the middle of the decade.
The company plans to invest 700 million SEK to achieve this goal in the coming years. It is also investing significantly in the in-house design and development of e-motors for the next generation of Volvo cars.