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9 years is a very aggressive deadline that will force Volvo to change the entire company from top to bottom and bottom to top. But if you want to achievement ve

9 years is a very aggressive deadline that will force Volvo to change the entire company from top to bottom and bottom to top. But if you want to achievement very difficult goals you really need to aim for the impossible.

im3w1l 6y ago
You seem to assume that the process starts today, but they have likely prepared for a while already before making this announcement.
dagw 6y ago
Volvo has been producing 100% electric cars on and off for a few years now and basically their entire line is available as plugin hybrids, so they're not completely starting from 0. The Polestar 2 has even been getting pretty good reviews, even when compared to Teslas.
chrisseaton 6y ago
> 9 years is a very aggressive deadline They've got no choice - governments are banning them in Y-9. It's adapt or go out of business at this late stage.
- rsj_hn 6y ago
  LOL, no government is going to ban them in 9 years. OK, maybe Monaco or something. First, fuel transitions take on the order of 50-60 years. Nothing happens in 9 years. The first successful diesel locomotive engine was sold in the 1920s, they reached 50% market share in the 1950s, and the last major steam powered train engine was retired in the 1970s. And that's with massive cost savings of diesel over steam and a capital good that was allocated rationally, as it wasn't a consumer good sold to hundreds of millions of people. This isn't like software, where everyone leaves myspace in a few years and poof it's gone. People are in for a rude awakening when they face market realities of long term durable goods, especially engines that customers expect to last 20 years. Or is this like the promises to reduce CO2? Have they ever kept a single one of those promises? Promising to do something, especially something unrealistic and to which your administration can't be held accountable, is not a meaningful promise, but a publicity stunt, made so easy by the fact that electorates today can only view the world in short time windows, thus the short memory and attention span which makes them easy to lie to, but also the impatience which requires a constant stream of unrealistic promises be made to them. You also see this in doomsday predictions, which are repeated ad nauseam - disaster X will happen in 10 years -- and due to the same short attention span no one seems to care that the same predictions were made forty, thirty, twenty, and ten years ago. It is always Year Zero for those living in the eternal now. And each time they are believed and met with promises as fake as the predictions, similar ineffectual promises being made 20 years ago, 10 years ago, and today. Those who manage to live outside this bubble of inattentive forgetfulness realize that things happen slowly, they happen in response to market pressure, and governments have only limited influence on these pressures.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > especially engines that customers expect to last 20 years I don't think they're proposing they're banned from being used, but from being sold new, so how long an old engine lasts is irrelevant.
    - rsj_hn 6y ago
      If they are being used, there is a market for them and they will be sold new as well. There isn't a big gap between something that needs to be serviced being used and something being sold. But if you really believe it will be illegal to sell new gas cars in 9 years, why not make your case on long bets? It is the most absurd thing I've read up until the guy advocating getting rid of professional homebuilders in Berlin so that people can make their own homes by hand.
      - chrisseaton 6y ago
        > If they are being used, there is a market for them and they will be sold new as well. You think Volvo will keep building and selling black-market petrol cars and nobody will notice? > if you really believe it will be illegal to sell new gas cars in 9 years, why not make your case on long bets? That's... that's what Volvo are doing. They're betting on it happening so hard they're completely switching their business up. That's what the article is about.
        rsj_hn 6y ago
        No, you have changed the subject from what governments will ban to what an individual private firm does. If I had said no private automaker will exit the ICE market over the next 9 years, then your response would have been on topic. It would also have been a strange thing to say since we know private firms exit markets all the time. That Chrysler is still in business stuns me every day, they should sell off their truck business and shut down the rest. Trucks and SUVs are the main things that US firms compete in now, as the personal auto market is so thoroughly dominated by Japan and Korea. For example, Ford announced it was exiting the personal auto market (https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/ford-stops-making-cars/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/ford-stops-making-cars/). Yet that market remains. Volvo, always a niche player in the personal auto market but one of the most successful truck manufacturers in the world, split off the personal auto division and sold them to various foreign firms, none of which could make volvo cars turn a profit, and ultimately they ended up owned by a Chinese holding company. I wish them well, maybe they can turn things around and this new focus is what they need. The much larger and industry leading Volvo truck business, OTOH, was not sold off, and has made no announcements to exit the ICE market. That's how markets work. We want entry and exit to be as free as possible. As it stands, you are responding to something I didn't say and trying to debate points no one is making. I said no major government will ban sales of ICE vehicles in the next 9 years and any promises to do so should be viewed with the same credibility as all their other promises on CO2. In fact, has even a single promise been kept? So now we are back on the topic of governments keeping promises, not market actors responding to market incentives. But if you really believe promises by governments to take action in 9 years when all the previous promises were ignored, then go ahead and believe. In some sense these promises work if they make you feel better now and help win elections today - it is politics-as-therapy - and they do no harm to the economy in that they will be ignored. Which is not to say that ICE is here to stay -- but it will be economic concerns that dominate the discussion -- how much cheaper/faster/more convenient is the replacement not because of government promises to overrule the market. Those should be viewed purely as therapy.

im3w1l 6y ago

You seem to assume that the process starts today, but they have likely prepared for a while already before making this announcement.

dagw 6y ago

Volvo has been producing 100% electric cars on and off for a few years now and basically their entire line is available as plugin hybrids, so they're not completely starting from 0. The Polestar 2 has even been getting pretty good reviews, even when compared to Teslas.

chrisseaton 6y ago

> 9 years is a very aggressive deadline They've got no choice - governments are banning them in Y-9. It's adapt or go out of business at this late stage.

rsj_hn 6y ago
LOL, no government is going to ban them in 9 years. OK, maybe Monaco or something. First, fuel transitions take on the order of 50-60 years. Nothing happens in 9 years. The first successful diesel locomotive engine was sold in the 1920s, they reached 50% market share in the 1950s, and the last major steam powered train engine was retired in the 1970s. And that's with massive cost savings of diesel over steam and a capital good that was allocated rationally, as it wasn't a consumer good sold to hundreds of millions of people. This isn't like software, where everyone leaves myspace in a few years and poof it's gone. People are in for a rude awakening when they face market realities of long term durable goods, especially engines that customers expect to last 20 years. Or is this like the promises to reduce CO2? Have they ever kept a single one of those promises? Promising to do something, especially something unrealistic and to which your administration can't be held accountable, is not a meaningful promise, but a publicity stunt, made so easy by the fact that electorates today can only view the world in short time windows, thus the short memory and attention span which makes them easy to lie to, but also the impatience which requires a constant stream of unrealistic promises be made to them. You also see this in doomsday predictions, which are repeated ad nauseam - disaster X will happen in 10 years -- and due to the same short attention span no one seems to care that the same predictions were made forty, thirty, twenty, and ten years ago. It is always Year Zero for those living in the eternal now. And each time they are believed and met with promises as fake as the predictions, similar ineffectual promises being made 20 years ago, 10 years ago, and today. Those who manage to live outside this bubble of inattentive forgetfulness realize that things happen slowly, they happen in response to market pressure, and governments have only limited influence on these pressures.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > especially engines that customers expect to last 20 years I don't think they're proposing they're banned from being used, but from being sold new, so how long an old engine lasts is irrelevant.
  - rsj_hn 6y ago
    If they are being used, there is a market for them and they will be sold new as well. There isn't a big gap between something that needs to be serviced being used and something being sold. But if you really believe it will be illegal to sell new gas cars in 9 years, why not make your case on long bets? It is the most absurd thing I've read up until the guy advocating getting rid of professional homebuilders in Berlin so that people can make their own homes by hand.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      > If they are being used, there is a market for them and they will be sold new as well. You think Volvo will keep building and selling black-market petrol cars and nobody will notice? > if you really believe it will be illegal to sell new gas cars in 9 years, why not make your case on long bets? That's... that's what Volvo are doing. They're betting on it happening so hard they're completely switching their business up. That's what the article is about.
      - rsj_hn 6y ago
        No, you have changed the subject from what governments will ban to what an individual private firm does. If I had said no private automaker will exit the ICE market over the next 9 years, then your response would have been on topic. It would also have been a strange thing to say since we know private firms exit markets all the time. That Chrysler is still in business stuns me every day, they should sell off their truck business and shut down the rest. Trucks and SUVs are the main things that US firms compete in now, as the personal auto market is so thoroughly dominated by Japan and Korea. For example, Ford announced it was exiting the personal auto market (https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/ford-stops-making-cars/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/ford-stops-making-cars/). Yet that market remains. Volvo, always a niche player in the personal auto market but one of the most successful truck manufacturers in the world, split off the personal auto division and sold them to various foreign firms, none of which could make volvo cars turn a profit, and ultimately they ended up owned by a Chinese holding company. I wish them well, maybe they can turn things around and this new focus is what they need. The much larger and industry leading Volvo truck business, OTOH, was not sold off, and has made no announcements to exit the ICE market. That's how markets work. We want entry and exit to be as free as possible. As it stands, you are responding to something I didn't say and trying to debate points no one is making. I said no major government will ban sales of ICE vehicles in the next 9 years and any promises to do so should be viewed with the same credibility as all their other promises on CO2. In fact, has even a single promise been kept? So now we are back on the topic of governments keeping promises, not market actors responding to market incentives. But if you really believe promises by governments to take action in 9 years when all the previous promises were ignored, then go ahead and believe. In some sense these promises work if they make you feel better now and help win elections today - it is politics-as-therapy - and they do no harm to the economy in that they will be ignored. Which is not to say that ICE is here to stay -- but it will be economic concerns that dominate the discussion -- how much cheaper/faster/more convenient is the replacement not because of government promises to overrule the market. Those should be viewed purely as therapy.