Name: Volvo's CEO says EV innovation is like smartphones replacing feature phones
Uploaded: 2024-05-21
Duration: 6 min 20 s
Description: Jim Rowan says his company is on track to go all-electric by 2030, despite nonlinear electric car adoption.

Jim Rowan says his company is on track to go all-electric by 2030, despite nonlinear electric car adoption.

Volvo's CEO says EV innovation is like smartphones replacing feature phones

Photo illustration by Fortune. Photograph courtesy of Volvo Cars.

Leadership

Volvo’s CEO says EV innovation is like smartphones replacing feature phones

I'm guessing that the emails were a little bit different at Dyson as important as vacuum cleaners are, they probably weren't saving lives. I, I I'm pretty emotional about my V 11 animal back here and I don't travel without my hair dryer. So, welcome to leadership next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Alan Murray and I'm Mia you have set really ambitious goals, turning your fleet entirely electric by 2030. Are you on track to meet that goal? I know there's, there's been some progress fairly recently as well and some excitement but, but tell us where you feel you're at right now. Yeah. So we're making really good progress. So what we gave is we gave guidance that we, we expected to be fully elected by 2030 that we expected to have half of sales, um, fully elected by 2025. We're probably going to go into a double s curve as we pick up. I see in the US right now, the west coast electrifying extremely quickly. Even the east coast, large parts of the east coast electrifying quickly and then in the interior of the US, it's, that's taken longer, but we're in a really privileged position because we have mixed technology. We have really good plug in electric hybrids. We have, we have mild hybrid technology as well as pure electric so we can service all of those customers. And that gives us a really strong bridge to full electrification. And so that's maybe some of the difference. I'm really confident that we can get to where we need to get to by 2030 but it won't be linear. Uh We'll pick up a lot of that soon and then we'll see it transition slowly in other parts. Countrywide, things are really slowing down. Uh The US auto companies seem to be concerned about their goals which are more 2035 focus and you have uh companies like Hertz, the rental car company that had said it was going to build a big electric fleet and then it backed off. Uh the charging stations building is going really slow and you say it's not going to be linear. But do you really feel like 2030 is a, is a realistic goal? There are really two industries within one industry, you have mass market and you have premium when you're selling it and we're selling into the premium market. And the success factors for premium are very, very different from mass mass is basically based on price. Um And there's much, much less customer loyalty or brand loyalty. When you look at premium, you're selling to customers that generally have more than one car, especially in the US. And that means there's options for them to have a bed or a plug in electric hybrid as their second car. They may still want to have a full petrol car as their main car. And as they go through that adoption curve, but we can still sell them a pure electric car or we can sell them a plug in electric vehicle. And we see that more and more frequently. The other thing is when you're selling to the premium sector and the majority of cases they have their own homes, which means they have their own charge infrastructure, which means they don't rely on public charge infrastructure. And so that adoption to bed becomes much, much easier. What we find as well as in the US. Specifically, there's a lot of three car families, especially in the premium sector. That third car, more and more and more is becoming a bed because generally it's maybe for their Children and their Children are saying, hey mom, I want an electric car. So I think when you dissect the industry and remember as well, and we have 1% of the total car industry Volvo and we can get to 2% we will be massively successful. So I'm not chasing volume and I think there's enough customers around the world that want safety sustainability, you know, Scandinavian design uh that want full electric. And that's why by 2030. I think we can find enough of those customers to buy and large be a full electric. What are some of the learnings that you took away from your years at Blackberry? Oh, man, that is, that is such a good question. I mean, it really is because the reason I think it's such a good question is because I actually talk about it and in fact, the guys who are probably fed up me talking about the parallels to that, but just think about that industry, you're going through a massive transition, you're going from feature phones to smartphones. You have Nokia, you have Motorola, you have Sony Ericsson, you have HTC and of course, you have Blackberry really good at that stuff. Two years that transition took 2, 2.5 years as you went from feature phone to smartphone. And the guys who came at the back end of that as the winners weren't even in the game to start with. It was I Os and Android. In fact, it wasn't, it wasn't a hardware play that made the difference of the software and it was the software architecture of I Os and Android. And then of course Android that re enabled people like, like Samsung to get back in the game. And, and that's what I see right now. People are talking about electrification as the change profile within the auto industry, the missing the entire point, its software, it's, it's silicon probably more importantly, silicon, it's connectivity, real time, connectivity with zero latency and it's data and if you want to fit its energy management, but those four things come together. So and I'll give you an example. When I started with the company, we had to make some quick decisions around. Did we want to buy in technology or build that? So what do you build versus what do you buy very quickly? I looked at the silicon architecture and said, and that is a pretty good company. They understand core compute technology. If we're going to move to a co compute architecture, we should go, we should go make sure we talk to the video guys because I think these guys know exactly what they're doing in terms of high computational silicon. And then we've got Qualcomm and what a fantastic partner they are on the entertainment stack. So we say we're gonna buy that technology and we're going to partner with these great technology companies. And we also then partner with Google in terms of Android Auto and we partner with Apple in terms of Apple car because I don't think we need to be making those things when 7 billion people have either got an Android or an Apple phone. They just want to connect the phone seamlessly to a car, but we did want to own electrical propulsion. That's at the core of what we do. And we did want to own the safety stack. So although we're using NVIDIA Silicon, uh we are building the whole software stack from the silicon layer to the application layer of cameras and radars and lights and so on because we really wanted to make sure we understood that software.