Volvo expects EX30 to lower average age of its customers

BARCELONA, Spain -- Volvo's first small SUV will lure younger buyers as well as win over another important group, the automaker expects.

“The EX30 will lower the average age of our customers because we are reaching a much wider market,” Volvo Chief Operating Officer Javier Varela told Automotive News Europe. “We believe we are providing access to the premium-ness of the brand for young couples, young professionals and more. For instance, it is a fantastic car for empty nesters.”

Based on surveys covering Germany, Sweden, the U.K., China and the U.S., Volvo has found that the EX30 will appeal to people from their upper 20s to 85 years old, giving it the widest appeal of any model in the automaker's lineup. That is why Volvo expects the overall age of its customers to decrease.

The age profile for the XC40, Volvo's current entry model, is 45 and older in Europe and the U.S. and 45 and younger in China, Volvo said. Those numbers align with the company's average, therefore the XC40 has not had a noticeable effect on the age profile for Volvo customers.

Affordability

Varela said Volvo is able to keep the cost of the EX30 down by using a shared platform and using lower-cost lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries for its entry model.

The EX30's starting price of 36,590 euros in Germany undercuts the Opel Mokka Electric small SUV by more than 4,000 euros.

The EX30's other full-electric rivals include its China-made platform mate, the Smart #1 (both are underpinned by the Sustainable Experience Architecture, or SEA), which costs 900 euros more based on current prices on automakers' German websites.

‘Big ramp-up’ in 2024

When asked about pre-orders for the car, which will start reaching customers before year-end, Varela said they are above expectations.

“The big ramp-up of volumes will come next year,” he said.

While he declined to share any numbers, he confirmed at the EX30 press drive here that the pre-orders are higher than they were for the XC40 when it arrived in late 2017.

XC40's impact on sales

The XC40, Volvo’s first compact SUV, has had a big impact on the automaker’s global sales.

In its first full year of availability – 2018 -- Volvo sold 75,828 XC40s, up from 96 the year before. Therefore, nearly every sale – 75,732 -- was a net gain to the automaker’s total that year. In 2019, the XC40 added 64,015 sales to Volvo’s total (see table, below).

In both 2018 and 2019, Volvo set all-time highs for global sales.

Volvo CEO Jim Rowan told Automotive News Europe last November that the EX30 will be a “big part” of achieving the company's 2025 targets of boosting global sales 95 percent compared with last year to 1.2 million. Volvo wants 600,000 of those sales to be full-electric cars.

He said the target buyer for the EX30 is a “Gen Z person who is 18, 19 years old and coming into the car market for the first time” who wants a good price but also still wants top safety equipment.

Safety & sustainability

Varela said safety and sustainability are two of the small SUV’s unique selling points.

The EX30 will be Volvo's first model to offer a door-opening alert, warning people inside the car via visual and audio cues if they are about to open the door in front of a passing cyclist or other traffic user.

The system will be part of the EX30's standard safety equipment.

Volvo will be the second brand in the Zhejiang Geely Holding Group to offer the technology after Smart, in the #1.

The EX30's other standard safety features include a driver alert system with a sensor behind the steering wheel that detects eye and face movements about 13 times per second.

The system looks for signs that the driver is distracted, drowsy or otherwise inattentive and provides a warning.

Greenest EV in the lineup

The EX30 will also be Volvo's greenest electric vehicle yet.

Since announcing in 2019 that it wanted to a climate neutral company by 2040, Volvo Cars has been looking for ways to slash its life cycle carbon footprint.

By tackling emissions across the EX30's entire production and life cycle Volvo says it has reduced the small SUV's total carbon footprint over 200,000 km of driving to less than 30 metric tons.

That is 25 percent below the carbon footprints of the C40 and XC40 EVs.

Volvo aims to cut its overall CO2 emissions per car by 40 percent to 31.8 tons of CO2 per car by 2025 from 53 tons in 2018.

In addition, about 17 percent of all plastics in the car, from interior components to exterior bumpers, are recycled -- the highest percentage in any Volvo car to date.

“When it comes to sustainability, we have taken this car to the next level, particularly in materials,” Varela said. “We are not hiding the recycled content, such as our panels made of denim.”

One of the features Varela is most proud of in the EX30 is the solution the automaker found to provide high-end audio.

Volvo consolidated the speakers that would typically go into the front doors into a sound bar at the base of the the windshield and moved the window switches to the center console. That boosted door storage capacity and trimmed manufacturing cost and complexity.

The Volvo EX30 will be built in Zhangjiakou, China, at a factory primarily powered by climate-neutral energy, including 100 percent climate-neutral electricity, Volvo said, adding that 95 percent of the SUV's Tier 1 suppliers have committed to using 100 percent renewable energy in their production by 2025.

Volvo will add EX30 production in Europe as a "natural hedge" against possible EU government actions aimed at curbing imports of the China-made version of the car. The EX30 will be added in 2025 to Volvo's factory in Ghent, Belgium, which also builds the XC40 and C40 full-electric cars.

Volvo also said the EX30's so-called cradle-to-grave CO2 impact is estimated at 18 metric tons.