Volvo insists it shouldn’t be considered among the influx of Chinese brands in Australia - despite the Swedish mainstay now being owned by China’s automotive giant Geely - telling CarsGuide it has something none of them can offer.
Though it once had the Australian market to itself, a fleet of Volvo’s Chinese siblings have all now arrived here, with Polestar, Geely and Zeekr all on sale, and Lynk & Co soon to arrive. And that’s just under the Geely Group umbrella, with brands like XPeng, Deepal, BYD and more all in Australia and fighting for market share.
But speaking at the launch of the all-electric EX90, Volvo said it doesn’t fear the newcomer Chinese brands, insisting it has something that none of them can offer - heritage.
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“The only thing I would say, and this isn’t about Geely, it’s about the other brands. You can’t suddenly create a heritage overnight,” says Volvo Cars Australia Managing Director, Stephen Connor.
“So whatever people say, we’ve got 97 years worth of heritage in this company. We’ve been making cars that look beautiful and drive beautifully. That doesn’t come overnight.
“So people won’t migrate to them overnight. People will still want the tried and trusted. And we will remain in that basket. So we won’t try and compete with them.”
Mr Connor said newcomer brands, rather than embracing their Chinese roots, were instead trying to borrow from Volvo’s genuine Scandinavian heritage, something that he takes as a “compliment”.
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“This brand… in their launch, they stood up and said, ‘yes, and we've got Scandinavian design and heritage’,” he says.
“But that just tells you that they're looking at us and going ‘actually, we want to mirror some of the things that they do.’
“That's a compliment.
“We don't have to create that heritage, right? We don't have to stand up and say, 'don't you love our Scandinavian design?' Because it is Scandinavian design.
"Even though we're owned by a Chinese parent company, the great thing they've done is they left us to be alone and left us to be Swedish. So our point of difference is that we're Swedish.
"There's no other OEM in Australia who can claim that."
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