New Volvo goal: 1m electrified vehicles sold by 2025

"It is a deliberately ambitious target," says Håkan Samuelsson, president and chief executive. "It is going to be a challenge, but Volvo wants to be at the forefront of this shift to electrification."

Volvo Cars has been readying itself for the emergence of electrified vehicles for the last five years. It has developed two all-new vehicle architectures for larger and smaller cars - Scalable Product Architecture (SPA) and Compact Modular Architecture (CMA) - which can incorporate either hybrid or fully-electric technology.

The larger 90- and 60-series cars are to be built on SPA, and the company will soon launch a global range of smaller 40 series cars on the CMA platform. All of these cars will be available as electrified models alongside their conventional petrol and diesel variants. The one million electrified car target is a cumulative total.

Sustainability programme

The new electrified car pledge forms part of a wide ranging review of Volvo's strategic sustainability programme, announced on 21 April 2016, which contains several new commitments that place sustainability at the centre of its future business operations. The new commitment has been christened 'omtanke', which is a Swedish word which means 'consideration' or 'caring'.

Other commitments being made by Volvo Cars are that it will:

• impose climate-neutral operations by 2025,

• have 35% of its leading positions held by women by 2020,
• move further towards its vision that by 2020 no one will be killed or seriously injured in a new Volvo,

• and work with international partners to promote sustainability.

In South Africa, the first step towards electrified mobility is about to be taken - Volvo Car South Africa is due to release the all-new Volvo XC90 T8 Twin Engine (plug-in hybrid) in May 2016.