Saar: B for battery? Or B for bensin, which is Swedish for petrol?
Over the past year or so, Volvo Cars has been boasting a lot about the plans of electrifying its product portfolio. It even went on say that by the middle of next decade, or in other words by 2025, it aims to garner 50 per cent of global sales from pure electric vehicles. Mind you, that also covers the Polestar brand which, like Tesla, will produce nothing but pure electric cars. But those models will be for the super wealthy. What about the less fortunate, you know, wealth-wise? That’s the market that Volvo will be targeting to sell its all-electric models.
And based on a report, the process of injecting a pure electric Volvo model is well underway. The Swedish carmaker has reportedly trademarked two nameplates – XC60 B4 and XC60 B5. Let’s just spend a minute or two to decode it in Swedish style. Going by the current nomenclature that Volvo Cars follows, T for petrol-powered vehicles and D for diesel-fed ones, the letter B might just be a reference to a battery-powered engine. That, in simpler terms, means all Volvo models with a B in their name will be pure electrics.
That is one possibility. The other, nearly improbable one, could be that Volvo wants to relive some of the chapters from its own history again. What does that mean? Well, if you are a Volvo fan, you would know that decades ago the company sold B-marked models in the USA and they were powered by a petrol engine. The thing is if you translate petrol into Swedish, you get bensin as the answer. But if Volvo is taking this route, it would have to rename all the current petrol-powered cars by ditching the T and bringing in the B. Or could it be just these two variants of the Volvo XC60 which will wear the B tag with a petrol engine? If that’s the case then they must be some sort of super-special editions.
We think it will probably be the first scenario. But you have to admit, the second probability did have some zing to it! Anyway, the B4 and B5 tags will probably equate to different sizes of battery packs and the power output of the electric engine. Needless to say, Volvo will be borrowing almost everything from pure electric Polestar models to power its own range of electric vehicles.
Adding an all-electric powerplant underneath the XC60 before any other model is somewhat of a surprise. SUVs are definitely in more demand than comparable sedans but we would have put our money on a pure electric derivative of the XC40 first. It, in fact, is already in the making. Having said that, it is possible that Volvo has already trademarked the EV version of other, smaller models and the news just didn’t surface. Expect the pure electric Volvo XC60 to break cover early next year and go on sale soon after.
Source: Swedespeed
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