Volvo delivers 5,000th electric semi

https://electrek.co/2025/06/29/volvo-delivers-5000th-electric-semi-with-little-fanfare-sending-a-big-message/

by JumpCrisscross • 1 year ago

265 237 1 year ago

electrek.co

cranberryturkey• 1 year ago

i just drove 13 hours from bay area to north eastern california (Alturas) and i didn't see one electric big rig.

mertd• 1 year ago

I wouldn't recognize the Volvo EV semi pictured in the article while driving. It looks generic.

wolrah2• 1 year ago

1. How sure are you? The ones from established manufacturers don't really look substantially different from their diesel counterparts. Unless you're really looking closely you'd have a hard time telling them apart.

2. Electric semi trucks are not ideal for long distance trips, they're more for predictable day routes, so it wouldn't surprise me to not encounter many of them on what was presumably a highway drive.

seb1204• 1 year ago

Similar to cars, it's easy to spot Teslas but other brands don't stand out this much and you really need to know the little details to spot. Same for trucks.

xienze4• 1 year ago

Similar to cars, it's easy to spot Teslas but other brands don't stand out this much and you really need to know the little details to spot.

Disagree. All you have to do is look for lack of a front grill or flush door handles to tell if a car is an EV.

rsynnott7• 1 year ago

These are mostly being sold in Europe, not the US. They're also not particularly distinctive looking, mostly; I'm sceptical that most people could identify one offhand as it passed by.

sandworm1015• 1 year ago

I have trouble calling these "semi". The do good work and are an environmental boon to short hauls, but "up to" ranges of 500km arent really semi territory imho. A better measurment imho is time. These things are good for four or five hours of highway driving, much much less when fully loaded or in mountains. So they cannot sustain a full day of driving without recharge. That is a delivery truck duty cycle, not semi.

(A typical diesel semi does 3500km between fillups, long enough for a few days of driving and about as long as the longest hauls in north america.)

And there is a big push for much larger trucks (net safety, less manpower/maintenance etc). Trucks that haul two 40-foot teus are comming. We need far better battery capacities to electrify such loads.

jdndnen• 1 year ago

A semi truck is defined by having a separate tractor and trailer unit

These have exactly those

You might be thinking of long distance haules, but what's long distance also depends on the environment

In 500 km you can cross most counties in europe

sandworm1015• 1 year ago

It isnt about travel distances. Most "long haul" trucks dont go anywhere near maximum range on a given run. It is about driver time. A truck that cannot keep a driver driving for an entire shift (8 or 10 hours) is a logistics problem. At four or five hours, drivers will need to get to a depo and swap out for another truck mid-shift in order to keep driving, which is a wildly inefficient use of expensive human resources.

What is needed are 8 or 10-hour endurance trucks, even if at a lesser load, as that will cover a driver's day and allow recharge during rest periods.

diggan4• 1 year ago

In 500 km you can cross most counties in europe

500km doesn't even get me to the capital of my European country. Maybe you're thinking specifically about Eastern Europe or something, where there is a bunch of smaller countries closer together?

joshuamorton• 1 year ago

Lots of semi trucking is not "long-haul". In many European countries, you don't have need for long-haul routes for port to city or city to port transit.

Paris to Rotterdamn is under 500km, and Paris to Le Havre is much shorter (although these also have train routes).

Similarly, they could serve basically any route in the UK or Ireland.

VBprogrammer5• 1 year ago

The majority of trucking in the UK is based on the tramping model. A driver gets in his truck at 6am on a Monday and drives it around the country until Friday evening. Sleeping in service stations, lay-bys and industrial estates depending on where they can find availability (often with difficulty).

The idea that electric trucks could just slot into this is extremely naive.

mattlondon2• 1 year ago

Drivers by law have to take a 45 minute break every 4.5 hours in Europe, with max 9 hours driving a day.

Don't know how fast these things can charge though, but suspect they'll have more than your typical 350kw passenger car chargers.

This is the same argument people used to have about electric cars: if I can't drive nonstop for 18 hours at 95mph up a mountain hauling a speedboat and recharge up to 100% in 30 seconds then they're worthless etc etc. In reality these are not realistic or typical usage patterns.

sandworm1015• 1 year ago

A good question is then whether a driver can recharge a truck during rest periods. Most jurisdictions dont allow refueling or maintenance during driver rest periods.

Trucks are not personal vehicles. They are run as part of a business. If an electric trucks can save money, every business will switch immediately. That isnt happening because the math/money doesnt, yet, make sense.

mdavid6263• 1 year ago

True, most people don’t drive that much at once. BUT When I need to drive a lot, then I want to be able to do it. Driving for 600km / 6 hours, taking few hours break and coming back 600km the same day is easily possible with a gasoline/diesel car. It’s a pain with an electric one.

bob10292• 1 year ago

We need far better battery capacities

I'm getting really nervous as we cross into the megawatt-hour territory. A tank full of diesel fuel isn't exactly a walk in the park during a disaster, but it takes a few minutes or hours to burn off. The battery can dump all of its energy in seconds. Managing a diesel fire is a much more understood artform.

What would a million watt hours look like if released in <10 seconds? How many casualties would we have if this were to occur in a tunnel or other confined roadway environment?

I think this is an example of a "good" outcome: https://ctif.org/news/electric-semi-truck-lithium-battery-fi...

CraigJPerry• 1 year ago

megawatt-hour territory. A tank full of diesel fuel

A full diesel tank on a truck is circa 13 megawatt hours

A bigger risk than the energy density (or how bomb-like it is) must be the self-sustaining fires.

Per mile driven, electric trucks have less fires than diesel ones but when they go on fire, they can be harder to put out.

It's different risk profiles, diesel can run downhill in an accident and create a fairly hard to contain situation. BEVs don't really do that but they reject attempts to snuff them out.

I like the Edison Motors concept a lot. Diesel generator running at peak efficiency charging a small battery. From a fire hazard point of view, probably worst of both worlds when it does go up in flames but i'd still expect less fires than conventional diesel trucks, based on nothing but the gut feeling that the drastic simplification of the drive train results in fewer ignition opportunities.

audunw4• 1 year ago

What are you talking about? Batteries don’t dump their energy in seconds. They dump their energy over many, many hours.

The initial burst of flames you see in some videos is not the energy stored in the battery, it’s the flammable electrolytes separating the anode and cathode that’s burning.

There’s a study from Sweden that set an ICE and EV car on fire. The energy release profile is fairly similar. The ICE is a bit more intense overall. So there’s nothing inherently more dangerous about batteries. Quite the opposite.

The only issue with (current gen li-ion) batteries is the thermal runaway. When the battery is shorted the energy is dumped over the following hours and it’s nearly impossible to stop. It’s doesn’t “burn” per se, but it will get so hot that it will re-ignite any flammable material that the car or truck is made out of. For a trained fire department it’s fairly easy to deal with though. You just need to cool the battery pack during the time where it’s dumping its energy. This could be done with a specialised hose that sprays water underneath the battery pack. You can inflate a barrier around the car and fill that with water. We’ve also seen that fire departments get an empty container delivered, fill it with a bit of water and lift the car into it. For a truck that’s obviously not possible. My point is there’s dozens of ways to deal with it.

Several next generation batteries (which are fairly mature and well beyond the lab stage at this point) have electrolytes that are less flammable or not flammable at all. So you avoid both the initial burst of flames and reduce the potential of thermal runaway. With good separation between cells/packs, it’s extremely unlikely that the whole pack will burn at once.

EV cars and trucks are already objectively (as measured by fire statistics in countries with high share of EVs like Norway) safer. No company is going to introduce a battery chemistry unless it’s more safe than the current commercial cells, so it’s only going to get better from here. Fire departments are only going to be better trained, and these days they can just copy the learnings from countries like Norway, where the fire departments already consider EVs to be far better for overall fire safety than ICE vehicles.

Batteries have the potential to be nearly entirely fire proof, even while storing a lot of energy, so the future is very bright in this area.

WillAdams5• 1 year ago

Diesel truck fires can be quite problematic in-and-of-themselves:

https://www.thetruckersreport.com/news/tanker-explodes-on-pa...

MagicMoonlight• 1 year ago

500km is enough to drive anywhere in the UK, so it would be plenty for most uses.

VBprogrammer5• 1 year ago

My trip home to my parents is 400 miles (about 650km) and that's far from the the most extreme journey.

Presumably you mean with recharging? Which is theoretically fine but the charging infrastructure for large vehicles is currently nonexistent. We see some electric busses, from Gatwick if I remember correctly, coming to recharge at Cobham services in the regular car charging spots.

jdietrich• 1 year ago

European perspective:

A large proportion of truck traffic in the EU is regional trunking - regular runs between distribution centres, typically as part of a hub-and-spoke model. To give an example, If I receive a parcel via Royal Mail, it's likely to have travelled via the Midlands Super Hub to my local mail centre, a distance of about 120 miles. At either end of that journey, the truck is likely to spend at least 30 minutes being unloaded and loaded.

There are many thousands of routes like that, with a constant flow of trucks covering relatively short distances on a predictable schedule. The operators running those routes have fleets of many thousands of vehicles and would have no difficulty whatsoever in managing a mixed fleet, using diesel or electric based on what's most suitable for the role; with diesel costing over $7 a gallon, there's a very obvious financial advantage to electric trucks.

Currently, the rollout of electric trucks is overwhelmingly bottlenecked by grid capacity rather than vehicle range - installing rapid chargers on every loading bay in a medium-sized distribution centre might require 20 megawatts of peak capacity, which isn't the kind of thing you can wire up overnight. Many operators are ready and eager to switch a large proportion of their fleet to electric trucks, they're just waiting for the grid to catch up.

tomatocracy• 1 year ago

It's not just time but cost of building out charging infrastructure and grid connections. I looked at some numbers on this a couple of years ago and the costs back then were big enough to make anything medium or long distance non-viable absent either huge amounts of subsidy or a big shift in the relative price of electricity vs diesel (which is realistically only likely to happen via big taxes on truck diesel).

ta20240528• 1 year ago

Europe should 'electrify' their trucking by putting their long-haul trucks on electric trains.

Europe's truck haulage is too high. IMHO

rsynnott7• 1 year ago

These are mostly being sold in Europe, so with mandatory break times, the range is likely Good Enough.

crote9• 1 year ago

Trucks that haul two 40-foot teus are comming. We need far better battery capacities to electrify such loads.

Put the battery underneath the trailers and you've basically solved the problem.

lars_francke4• 1 year ago

These do exist already. The Electrictrucker also has a video about this. They can be combined with a EV truck as a range extender or with a regular truck to save on gas/diesel.

flask_manager2• 1 year ago

Awkward headline, since its not really much of a milestone. The first couple in a region are interesting, hitting significant proportions a year is interesting, a cumulative (relatively) small number is not that interesting.

willio58• 1 year ago

Since when is 5k a couple? Volvo is selling these while companies like Tesla are cough asleep at the wheel. I think the article mentioned 140 Tesla semis sold.

rcMgD2BwE72F• 1 year ago

They're tooling up the new Semi factory in Nevada (next to their first Gigafactory) and it has 50000 units/year volume production capacity.

flask_manager2• 1 year ago

5k over 6ish years when volvo sells well over 100k ice a year. It doesnt look like they are even selling 1 % electric a year yet.

darkwizard42• 1 year ago

Given large fleet operators like JB Hunt operate about 30K vehicles, this is a pretty significant number.

mlindner• 1 year ago

5000 EVs is nothing though.

ethan_smith• 1 year ago

5,000 electric semis actually represents roughly 2% of Volvo's annual truck production and makes them the current market leader in heavy-duty electric trucks, far ahead of competitors like Daimler and Peterbilt.

qwertox• 1 year ago

There is this channel on YouTube named "Bruce Wilson", which I've got pushed onto my recommendation feed lately, and I've watched some of the videos:

This guy drives a Scania in the US, and it feels like he is more like a marketing stunt for Scania. He shows other truckers his one and they are all so surprised about the quality of this European truck, them getting the feeling that the US truck industry has been sleeping for decades in terms of evolution.

It should be easy for Volvo and Daimler Trucks to do the same, but I do not know why they don't do it.

https://www.youtube.com/@Bruce_Wilson

robin_reala• 1 year ago

It is marketing: they provided him with the truck, and he openly stated that he wants to be part of bringing Scania to the US long term.

therealpygon• 1 year ago

I think that is the point, that they don’t understand why other manufacturers aren’t doing the same, not that they didn’t understand it was marketing…

LeonM• 1 year ago

He shows other truckers his one and they are all so surprised about the quality of this European truck, them getting the feeling that the US truck industry has been sleeping for decades in terms of evolution.

As a European visiting US/Canada I once struck a conversation with a truck driver who had a really cool vintage semi, with lots of chrome and flare. I told him that I really liked the look of his truck, but that vintage trucks of that age would never be allowed on the road again in Europe, at least not for commercial jobs.

He then told me his truck was basically brand new...

Besides me making a fool of myself, I really grew an appreciation for the EU having rules about semis, especially in the noise department. Yeah, US domestic semi trucks are cool in their own way, but the constant noise of clutch fans, air brakes, 'jake' brakes, 'stack' exhaust with no of mufflers, etc. would drive me insane.

In (most of) Europe, all vehicles are subject to strict noise and emission rules, and many larger cities are now congestion zones which prohibits larger/older diesel powered vehicles from entering the city. Same for my city, where most trucks and busses are now electric. Since it happened gradually the change wasn't all that noticeable, that is until you go somewhere else and hear (and smell!) a diesel powered bus/semi drive by... We like to complain about all the 'stupid' government rules, but when you go to a place without those laws you really start to appreciate them, it truly feels like taking a step 'back' for the worse.

porphyra6• 1 year ago

For some reason, from a purely aesthetic standpoint, even brand new electric trucks in the US look very vintage, with their giant chrome grill and fender flares, compared to European and Asian trucks. [1]

[1] https://www.peterbilt.com/trucks/zero-emission/567EV

vladgur• 1 year ago

Speaking of “complaining about stupid government rules”, I’m currently waiting to board a flight back to SFO from Europe and one thing that I have missed through my southern Europe vacation are the rules prohibiting smoking in or around the restaurant.

This is what I got used to in California but unfortunately should you find a fantastic outdoor restaurant table to enjoy the European sunset, chances are somebody will be smoking right next to you and your kid.

neom• 1 year ago

fwiw and not to diminish your point, semi trucks in Canada are rarely heard, they mostly drive along our massive highways, they are generally not allowed in cities, and you can drive from one end of Canada to the other (east <> west) on Highway 1 without entering cities/big towns, the most populated area you have to drive through is at the Ontario/Manitoba border. (Source, I've driven Canada fully, end to end e->w)

mensetmanusman2• 1 year ago

US semis travel 2-3x further per haul on average.

WillAdams5• 1 year ago

Reasons behind this:

- many U.S. truckers are owner-operators --- the rig has to appeal to them, and is in many ways, an extension of their self-perception

- bring up a map of the U.S. and plot occupations on it, removing "school teacher" and "farmer" --- for many rural counties, the most common (and one of the best-paying) is long-haul trucker --- I can still vividly recall the elaborate drawings and plans which many of my classmates in a rural school would draw up of elaborate 18-wheelers (that this situation was brought about by the county board of supervisors being comprised of large land owners who wanted an essentially captive population to work their farms is a different discussion)

m463• 1 year ago

From what I understand "US Domestic semi trucks" are not homogenous.

For example, I think trucks in california are usually almost new due to regulations.

ano-ther• 1 year ago

Daimler in the US is Freightliner (and some others):

https://northamerica.daimlertruck.com/brands/products

https://northamerica.daimlertruck.com/company/history

spacecadet2• 1 year ago

My family has owned a excavating business since the 60s and you would see my pop and think he is some typical backwoods Mainer, but we have always purchased Volvo, Hitachi, Komatsu. A few times at our peak Volvo even invited us down to their US test facility to dig wholes all day. That was fun. Ive owned several Volvo cars, PV544, P1800, 240, 740. I tell you- Its great they are back in the hands of the Swedes. We love a classic Peterbilt, but they are not worth their cost in this day.

spacecadet2• 1 year ago

PS, F*ck CAT and John Deere. From us.

masklinn6• 1 year ago

I do not know why they don't do it.

Because unless someone else crashes that market (Scania is clearly angling to be the one) they get away with selling rinky trucks so there’s no reason to spend more.

JumpCrisscross3• 1 year ago

them getting the feeling that the US truck industry has been sleeping for decades in terms of evolution

I’ve recently concluded the reason Waymo is dominating has nothing to do with automation and everything with reliability.

Both Uber and Lyft bet on maximising driver availability, even at the cost of reliability and quality. That left wide open those willing to wait a bit longer for a car that won’t cancel, won’t smell and won’t have someone who drives unsafely while on the phone. (And apparently even willing to pay a premium for it.)

potato3732842• 1 year ago

This guy drives a Scania in the US, and it feels like he is more like a marketing stunt for Scania. He shows other truckers his one and they are all so surprised about the quality of this European truck, them getting the feeling that the US truck industry has been sleeping for decades in terms of evolution.

You're not nearly jaded enough. The dude isn't doing product placement for Scania. He's making trucker content for urban white collar demographics hence the direction of the spin to fit that niche.

evanjrowley• 1 year ago

Perhaps that demographic is where Scania hopes to find new investors and/or large fleet customers.

moltar• 1 year ago

Funny, I also got this channel suggested by YT algo and watched some of the videos.

louwrentius2• 1 year ago

The YouTube channel Electric Trucker may be a revelation for people who are skeptical about electric semi trucks.

The way he speeds past diesel trucks driving up hill is indane.

https://youtube.com/@electrictrucker?si=9UHJ8OPMuLkZPtGx

lars_francke4• 1 year ago

He also has an english language version of his channel: https://www.youtube.com/@electrictrucker

It's very worth watching.

I think he's proven that single driver long haul freight in Western Europe (which seems to be a good chunk of truck trips) is perfectly doable. Just two weeks ago he did a 4.500km trip around Europe which is about the maximum you can do given the law on driving times.

The same is then true for the shorter trips (round trips etc.)

And the European Commission has just decided that electric trucks don't have to pay road toll until at least 2031.

Better for the environment, more comfortable, quieter, cheaper in the long run, ... what's not to like.

And yes: There are still some use-cases where non-EV trucks are "better" by some metrics but that's definitely not the case anymore everywhere.

louwrentius2• 1 year ago

Yes, I thought I linked to the English channel.

I'm in The Netherlands and I feel that we aren't even close to the level of adoption of electric trucks as in Germany.

Maybe it's easier to justify the investments for a much larger country/market.

to11mtm2• 1 year ago

Better for the environment, more comfortable, quieter, cheaper in the long run, ... what's not to like.

Pragmatically speaking, At least for the weight of a 'US Style Electric Tractor' my concern is that nobody in my state is following the Truck Speed limits as is. The added weight on top of the speeding means our roads turn to shit way way faster (I live near a major US/CA transit point for freight that also has sharp seasonal changes.)

Where this becomes a semi-concern for the practicality of such drivers (i.e. potential buyers,) the advertised range likely is based on certain assumptions, and going 70MPH+ likely results in a notable range reduction.

All of that said, I do really like that Frito Lay is using E-Transit vans for local distribution now; that 'last leg' is arguably at least as important as long haul, yet has the advantage of being way easier to solve from a logistics/planning standpoint. Amazon seems to have it figured out well with the rivian vans and they aren't changing strategy.

LightBug1• 1 year ago

What about range (especially under load)?

Speed in relation to semi trucks always seemed the most absolute vanity metric on earth!

disentanglement• 1 year ago

Range is somewhere between 350 and 600 km depending on conditions. Aerodynamics, weight, weather all have an influence as well as the battery size and efficiency of the specific model of truck. The guy on the youtube channel has driven most of the selection of currently available long haul electric trucks in Europe under a variety of conditions, so this seems fairly representative.

The trucks are all designed to be driven for the legally mandated maximum of 4.5 hours at highway speeds and to be recharged sufficiently in a 45 minute break to be able to do that again for another 4.5 hours. In particularly adverse conditions a little less driving time before recharging is possible but for an average load the currently available tech works just fine and it is mostly the charging infrastructure that limits adoption.

masklinn6• 1 year ago

I learned recently that US truckers have been losing their minds over truck specific speed limits.

general1726• 1 year ago

It can get even better if you will start throwing around acceleration from 0-60mph in 5 seconds like Tesla Semi.

jekwoooooe• 1 year ago

Tesla trucks delivered: 0

foobarbecue3• 1 year ago

Article says there are about 140, but I wonder what the details are-- are they really in production use?

porphyra6• 1 year ago

I've personally seen Pepsi Tesla Semis on the highway near Sacramento.

rsynnott7• 1 year ago

It is a testament to Elon Musk's vast skills at producing obfuscating noise that nearly all of the discussion of electric semi trucks here has been about the Tesla Semi, and not about trucks made by the many manufacturers who will actually sell you an electric semi truck.

antonvs• 1 year ago

In a way it's a testament to the lack of marketing skills of the truck companies that are selling these vehicles. Perhaps they don't feel the need market their capabilities to people who don't actually buy trucks, but there are some benefits to that kind of above-the-line advertising. As Musk has demonstrated.

dzhiurgis4• 1 year ago

Tesla cars delivered: 5,000 per day

audunw4• 1 year ago

We have a tunnel nearby that was built with a grade that’s too steep. Every year there’s a large ICE truck that overheats, catches fire and shuts the tunnel down for a while. This is simply not going to be an issue with EV trucks. A fire is possible but much less likely in general, and MUCH less likely in that specific scenario.

In Norway we’ve also already seen that tunnels and garages require less ventilation as the share of EVs gets higher, saving millions on new construction. Electric semi trucks will unlock the full benefit.

Larger vehicles like trucks and buses is also where you get the most benefit of noise reduction.

EV semi trucks are going to improve so many things.

ralferoo3• 1 year ago

This is simply not going to be an issue with EV trucks. A fire is possible but much less likely in general, and MUCH less likely in that specific scenario.

I'm actually not so sure. If the gradient is so steep that the vehicle is struggling to move at all, the current through the motor windings will be very high, causing the windings to overheat, potentially fail and potentially short circuit. There's a high risk of damaging the MOSFETs in the motor controller, which very much could lead to a fire risk depending on the failure mode.

There's not really many ways to solve this problem - in a normal 3-phase winding, all you can do is remove the current until it cools down and try again, but that will force the motor to stop and then try to restart, so creating an even larger load. Possibly if you have 6 more more phases and more magnets such that each of the normal 3-phases has multiple windings and magnets, you can cycle through the different ones and still keep applying some torque, but obviously this would still not really solve the fundamental problem.

Essentially the problem is the same for ICE vs EV - if the gradient is so steep and load so heavy that the engine / motor can't provide enough force, then it will be overloaded. Whether that's through pressure / shearing / excess heat in an ICE or through excess current / excess heat in EV, the outcome is failure to continue forward at best.

The only real solution is to massively over engineer the engine for normal situations, but human nature being what it is, there will always push things way beyond the designed limits and safety margins until it fails.

Kon5ole• 1 year ago

I'm actually not so sure. If the gradient is so steep that the vehicle is struggling to move at all

The problem isn't overloading the engine when you go up, it's overheating the brakes when you go down. The reasoning here is probably that EV semis will use regeneration for some of the braking thus avoiding the overheating to some extent.

audunw4• 1 year ago

It’s a lot easier to engineer an EV truck to handle steep gradients without overloading. We see from real examples that EV trucks are by default much more capable of driving fast uphill.

One part of this is the batteries. When you have the amount of batteries needed to drive a truck for a reasonable distance, you automatically get a high amount of power output as well. The power is distributed over many cells, so no overload there.

EV motors are significantly smaller than their ICE counterparts, they’re relatively cheap, don’t require significant maintenance and they generate much less waste heat for a given power output. Adding more motors+inverters to handle the required power is not over engineering in the case of an EV truck, it’s just good engineering. I suppose it’s even necessary to some degree, to deal with the lack of a multi speed gear box

As mentioned in the other comment, the problem is often overheating in brakes. This is also less of an issue with EVs. You can distribute the energy dissipation to the motors/batteries and the brake pads, so the heat load is less concentrated. Energy sent to the batteries is absorbed as energy stored, with very little waste heat.

crote9• 1 year ago

If the gradient is so steep that the vehicle is struggling to move at all

But such a gradient would be completely unusable for any ICE! EVs can deliver an absolutely insane amount of power at even the slowest speeds. If an EV has the power to sustain highway speeds, it'll also have the power to go up a steep hill at a snail's pace. On the other hand, an ICE will struggle significantly with steep hills - even if they technically have the horsepower to do it.

I highly doubt it'll result in a fire, though. Measuring motor current isn't exactly rocket science, so it'll just go into an overload mode. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if EV motors were explicitly designed to survive short-term stall currents. Measure the wheel speed and it's pretty obvious to figure out when you're stalling and should shut down to avoid damage.

ashoeafoot• 1 year ago

To be honest i thought this not possible without batteries advancing. Positive Surprised its economically viable. Go volvo! Go geely!

mfi• 1 year ago

Volvo Trucks is a different company than Volco Cars, and has nothing to do with Geely

127• 1 year ago

"Volvo is currently owned by the Chinese company Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, commonly known as Geely."

Yes, the Chinese are good at making EVs.

trklausss• 1 year ago

I don’t know the internals of the holding or Volvo, but the company that I work for is _technically_ American, and we operate like a full European company, developing everything in-house. The only thing the parent holding intermingles with us is numbers at the end of the year and strategic directions.

So this could be happening here as well: Chinese say “hey let’s do electric” and the rest happens in Sweden. Would it then be really a Chinese vehicle?

aspenmayer• 1 year ago

I don’t know the internals of the holding or Volvo, but the company that I work for is _technically_ American, and we operate like a full European company, developing everything in-house. The only thing the parent holding intermingles with us is numbers at the end of the year and strategic directions.
So this could be happening here as well: Chinese say “hey let’s do electric” and the rest happens in Sweden. Would it then be really a Chinese vehicle?

Yes, that's the nature of corporate headquarters. If the company doesn't want to be thought of as a Chinese company, it could relocate its corporate headquarters elsewhere.

This says nothing of the ownership structure and so on. A company could be just as Chinese due to ownership and/or control independently of where its corporate HQ is located. I don't think that this framing is especially useful, because there is no such thing as a stereotypical company or person. Individuals make up companies. Companies are just people, acting in concert.

To say a company is Chinese makes me wonder why that is important to the person saying it, and makes me wonder why that is the way they choose to phrase it, and makes me wish they would tell me more about actual individual people that exist and what their views and goals are. Corporations aren't people. People are corporations.

thg• 1 year ago

Geely owns Volvo Car AB. Volvo Trucks is a different company and part of the Volvo Group, which is not owned by Geely (but they are a big shareholder).

filvdg• 1 year ago

Volvo group is listed on the stock exchange , Geely has less than 5% of the shares https://www.volvogroup.com/en/investors/the-volvo-share/owne...

haunter• 1 year ago

There are 2 Volvos

- Volvo Cars, a chinese company owned by Geely. Formerly a part of Volvo Group/AB Volvo aka "The Volvo" people usually reference.

- Volvo Group/AB Volvo, which is still the original Volvo from 1927.

Volvo Trucks is part of Volvo Group not Volvo Cars

The two companies share name and logo

simondotau• 1 year ago

If you think that’s confusing, there are two completely separate Japanese companies who use the Mitsubishi name and the same red diamond logo to sell air-conditioners in Australia. The products have absolutely nothing in common; the two companies have been completely independent from each other since 1921.

https://www.mhiaa.com.au/

https://www.mitsubishielectric.com.au/

zvr• 1 year ago

Note that these are made by the "real" Volvo, not Volvo Cars which got sold a while ago and is now owned by the Chinese Geely.

ksec• 1 year ago

So Volvo only sold their "Car" brand to Geely and not Trucks? That is like Toshiba selling only their Appliance brand to another Chinese company or Sharp Display and TV belongs to Foxconn but not other Sharp products?

So who provides this Volvo Semi batteries? Geely / CATL or someone else?

masklinn6• 1 year ago

So Volvo only sold their "Car" brand to Geely and not Trucks?

Yes. And they bought Renault Trucks from Renault. And they own Mack in the US.

rsynnott7• 1 year ago

So who provides this Volvo Semi batteries? Geely / CATL or someone else?

Northvolt and Samsung, apparently.

That is like Toshiba selling only their Appliance brand to another Chinese company or Sharp Display and TV belongs to Foxconn but not other Sharp products?

That sort of thing is actually somewhat common in appliance-world; appliance _brands_ are often sold off or licensed. For instance, Siemens appliances are not made by the same Siemens who make trains and MRI scanners and things; they're made by GSH GmbH, which is owned by Bosch.

HP is another fairly well-known example; the HP (HP Inc) who makes the printers is no longer the same HP (HPE) who makes networking equipment and things.

And then of course in the automotive world there's Stellantis, which owns all the car brands that you vaguely assume no longer exist.

Volvo delivers 5,000th electric semi

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