Volvo’s XC40 crossover goes fully battery electric for “under $48,000”

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  This is the XC40 Recharge, Volvo's new battery electric crossover. It goes on sale next year at about $55,000 before you take any tax incentives into account. [credit: Brian Won ]

Volvo was one of the first automakers to declare its plans to do something about carbon emissions. In 2017, the Swedish OEM announced that it was abandoning development of diesel engines. A few weeks later, it promised that every new Volvo introduced from 2019 would be electrified in some form, whether that be as a mild hybrid, a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, or a battery electric vehicle.

On Wednesday, Volvo Cars President and CEO Håkan Samuelsson got even more concrete, saying that the company is aiming for plug-ins to make up 20% of all its new vehicle sales in 2020 and 50% by 2025. "Although you never really know how the customers will react," he added (customers still have to want to buy the EVs it wants to sell). To accomplish that, Volvo is going to be launching a new BEV each year. Today in Los Angeles, we got introduced to the first of these—the new battery electric XC40 SUV.

The XC40 first appeared in 2017 as the first vehicle to use Volvo's new Compact Modular Architecture. This is the same architecture that provides the building blocks for the forthcoming Polestar 2 BEV, as well as vehicles from Geely and Lynk & Co. Any XC40s you've seen on the road up until this point will have been conventional internal combustion engine-powered crossovers. But with this new variant, all that changes.