Tom von Bonsdorff, Managing Director, Volvo Auto India, accepts the award for the XC90.

VOLVO XC90

How has 2015 been for Volvo?

Well, we’re still a fairly small manufacturer, but we’re happy with the way we see the brand being built, and the way we see the network and sales growing. We would love to sell more of course, but we’re seeing a good growth number this year.

The architecture on which the XC90 is built is brand new. What other products can we expect on that platform?

It cost us $12 billion dollars to develop, which – especially for a company of our size – is huge. In fact, it’s equivalent to the cost of building the Oresund Bridge from Denmark to Sweden. So, you’ll see many of our future products coming on that platform.

How has the response been for the XC90?

It’s been fantastic. We had really high hopes for it of course, and our dealers have been waiting for it for a while. We’ve sold out the allocation for this year, and we’ve asked for more cars. In fact, we asked for more cars way back in the Spring when we realized that it was going to be a big hit for us.

Any renewed interest in setting up assembly operations because of your volumes ramping up?

Volume ramp up will, of course, be one of the deciding factors in local assembly. But we don’t have any decisions yet, or any firm plans. But when we see the market growing there’ll be an interest in that as well.

Safety is a big selling point for Volvo around the world. But how important do you feel it is in India – do you find people are becoming more receptive to that message here as well?

Of course it’s a challenge, there are 135,000 road fatalities here every year. It’s a big issue, and you can see that there’s some lack of safety consciousness in the country. You see this in the usage of seatbelts in the rear seats, or the number of people travelling without helmets on motorbikes. But, then again, people who can afford to put a one crore car on the road have travelled extensively, or lived abroad, and have a different consciousness. So, I think it’s increasing all the time. And, of course, one of the things we want to do is increase that consciousness from a human perspective – but also from a sales perspective!

Because of the pollution in some of our cities, do you think that the Clean Zone Technology is an interesting selling point for the XC90?

Lately, we’ve seen some of the big newspapers pick up the air quality issue and write about it. Sure, we’re in an industry that sells cars. But you can sell different types of cars. So, if you have a car with a diesel particle filter you can reduce the amount of particles (PM 2.5 and PM 10) by 99%. So we want to make cars as clean as possible from an emissions point of view, but we also want to provide a solution to our customers in Delhi for instance – who travel in very bad air, if not the worst air in the world. The awareness is increasing more-and-more, and we have a great solution because we have the best air quality system in the industry in the XC90.

How do you see the market playing out next year and what are your plans?

The latest numbers that I’ve seen don’t show a lot of growth for the premium segment, but these predictions have been wrong from time-to-time. So we hope for steady growth. In India, I hope for the competition to grow as well – because that means the market is growing. We obviously want to capture more market share, and we have quite a few launches for next year actually. We have one brand new launch, as well as a lot of new variants – so we’ll have a busy time next year.

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