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Volvo has already put its reputation behind its autonomous car program last week, and now it'southward laying down its electrical vehicle plans every bit well. Volvo announced that information technology will build its first fully electric machine and sell it by 2019 as role of an eventual full range of small cars. It'southward planning for x percent of its sales to exist EVs in the first years afterward.

"We believe that the fourth dimension has come for electrified cars to cease being a niche technology and enter the mainstream," Volvo Cars president and CEO Hakan Samuelsson said in a statement. "We are confident that by 2020, 10 percent of Volvo'due south global sales volition be electrified cars."

Today the automaker sells plug-in hybrid versions of its larger XC90 (pictured above) and V60, but that's it. So this would be a pretty big jump for Volvo, both to fully electric drivetrains and to smaller cars.

Volvo

"We take learned a lot about how people use cars with electrification thank you to our electric current product offering," said Dr Peter Mertens, Senior Vice President for Research and Development. "Our research has shown that people are driving our Twin Engine cars in electric fashion effectually fifty per cent of the time, meaning our plug-in hybrids already offer a existent alternative to conventional powertrain systems." That'due south probably pushing it a bit.

Still, the XC90 has plenty of safety tech to brainstorm with, and some of it is a cutting to a higher place what you lot go from competitors. It can hit the brakes in example a car in front stops short or if a pedestrian walking out into the street without looking, for example. The plug-in hybrid powertrain in the XC90 T8 consists of a nine.2 kWh lithium-ion battery pack, an 87 hp motor in the dorsum, a smaller 46 hp electric motor in the front, and the main turbocharged and supercharged four-cylinder gas engine in the front putting out 318 horsepower. Information technology's besides the only three-row plug-in hybrid SUV on the market.

It's interesting to see how much Volvo is looking to reestablish itself. The automaker's stagnation in recent years has been sad and mostly cocky-inflicted, thanks mostly to an crumbling production line. Equally someone that grew upwardly in the 1980s, this author remember full well how Volvo dominated the automotive advertisement market with its promises of the safest cars on the road. Seeing blocky 740 Turbo Wagons and stoic 240s on the route was commonplace. It would exist skillful to see that again with a total-blown range of cutting-range electric cars; the question is whether the company tin can pull off such a turnaround.

Last year, Volvo unveiled a neodymium magnetic route system pattern that could greatly simplify the pattern and operation of future cocky-driving cars.