Volvo rolls out 1st 'Made in India' car

Sweden’s Volvo Cars officially embarked on Make in India on Tuesday, when it rolled out the first locally-assembled XC90 from its plant near Bengaluru.

“We’ve just launched the first Made in India Volvo XC90 D5 Inscription,” Charles Frump, the newly appointed Managing Director for Volvo Auto India, told DH over phone.

It was in May this year that Volvo Cars announced working together with erstwhile parent Volvo Group for local assembly of cars, and began making use of the latter’s existing infrastructure and production licences near Bengaluru.

The XC90, which is one of the company’s success stories in India, is assembled locally for the Indian market through the CKD (Completely Knocked Down) route. “Right now, we’re shifting all of our CBU capacity to local assembly. We’re aiming to sell 500 units of the XC90 this year,” Frump said. Volvo Auto India’s local assembly plans do not end here. In the future, it contemplates assembling the entire SPA (Scalable Platform Architecture) portoflio — the 60 and 90 range of cars — at this facility at Hoskote. This range includes the S60, S60 Cross Country, S60 Polestar, XC60, XC90, XC90 Excellence, S90, and the V90 Cross Country.

“While a major push in our strategy is driven by local assembly, we are also looking at increasing our stable. Going forward, we’ll have the new XC60 — which is on sale in Europe — coming to India. Also, two weeks ago, we unveiled the compact SUV XC40 in Geneva, which opens a new segment for us, and is a good tool to step up our volumes. These two cars would be launched here,” Frump said.

From its entry into the Indian market in 2007, Volvo has sold 1,476 cars, and currently has a luxury segment share of about 5%. “We aim to double our share to 10% by 2020. We’ve had a robust 32% growth in sales volumes in the past two years, and the 2017 trend is as per our plan to achieve 2,000 cars,” he added.