Volvo to ‘never give up’ identity as it increases Geely parts sharing
Hardware from Polestar, Lotus, LEVC and more will become crucial to growing profit margins
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by Felix Page
4 mins read
6 November 2025
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Volvo will increase its use of shared hardware from across the Geely group as it embarks on a drive to cut costs and boost profit margins with future EVs.
The company has announced plans to work towards an operating margin of 8% – a substantial increase on last year’s 5.6% – as part of a wide-reaching strategy overhaul that revolves around growing its market share and increasing its EV mix.
Volvo has already announced 3000 job cuts as part of a landmark £1.4 billion savings drive and now says it will look to leverage its position as part of the Geely group to reduce costs and boost efficiencies in the development of future products – a move that will result in “intensified joint hardware sourcing in collaboration with Geely”.
The company’s R&D boss, Anders Bell, explained the move to Autocar: “Geely has become a powerhouse, primarily in China, that we can benefit more from than we have been able to historically,” which is important as “scale, synergies and sharing” have become so integral to profitability in today’s automotive environment.
Bell stopped short of naming any specific opportunities for Volvo to share hardware with its Geely siblings – including Polestar, Lotus, LEVC, Lynk&Co and the eponymous Geely brand – but said: “We welcome finding partners and finding synergies on non-product differentiating areas.”
However, he added, this push for synergies will not come at the expense of Volvo’s unique positioning and the company will work to ensure its cars remain obviously distinct from those of its siblings.
He said: “There is always this balance of uniqueness and being true to the brand and being true to our customers – we will never give up on that – but also finding collaborations.
“The engineering aspects that made us survive for the last 100 years we need to protect for the next 100 years. That’s pretty straightforward: beautiful, Scandinavian design; reliable; high-tech but in a human-centric way. This is still going to be the recipe for successful Volvo cars.”
Bell said the new Volvo EX60 – the first car to use the company’s new SPA3 modular architecture – will exemplify this ethos, showcasing “the perfect marriage between electromechanical power, electronics and software” – the last of those being especially important in the context of Volvo’s push to be a manufacturer of “fully software-defined vehicles”.
He acknowledged the firm’s recent struggles in this area, with the EX90 flagship SUV recently subject to a significant round of over-the-air tech updates to address a number of high-profile glitches and bugs in Volvo’s new software stack.
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Volvo EX90
New seven-seat SUV joins XC90 in showrooms as a technological trailblazer for Volvo’s all-electric future
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But, he said, the pioneering nature of the EX90, as a wholly new technical proposition, meant that it was “more than just a car – it was an entire new, profound way of making a car, and with that the whole platform, the software factory, all the processes…”
It was “unfortunate” that some of the early bugs “spilled over to early customers”, he said. “We need to keep our challenges inside the company.” But as of the last software update, the EX90 now has “better quality metrics than the rest of the cars”.
“The shaky days are over”, he said. “It’s unfortunate, but it’s done now. It’s over. Now we are stabilising and we need to keep polishing the diamond.”
‘The diamond’ is the technical stack that underpins all the EX90’s systems and features in its latest form in the new ES90 saloon – as well as the upcoming EX60, to be revealed on 21 January.
Bell does not anticipate that these cars will endure such a troublesome launch. “It’s not something we will repeat with every car, because we will not launch a new software stack ever again in the history of the company.”
The root of the early issues, he explained, was that Volvo was “the first legacy car company to actually come through with level-five, fully software-defined vehicles” and so “had to invent a lot of stuff ourselves. There was simply nothing to buy, or a manual or tools on how to do it.
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“There’s much more of that emerging now. We’ve learned so much now on how to operate and run the machine – and we know what great looks like.”
Beyond its software capabilities, Bell said the EX60 will “absolutely compete on numbers” with the new BMW iX3 and Mercedes-Benz GLC it has been conceived to do battle with, but “numbers don’t sell cars”.
Instead, he suggested, the EX60 will appeal on the basis of its “attractiveness, fantastic customer experience and the brilliant integration of the product into your digital life.”
Volvo is keeping all specific details about power, range and price under wraps until the unveiling, so it is not yet known if it will match its rivals’ near-500-mile ranges, nor whether its maker’s ploy to “attract more customers to the Volvo brand at lower costs” means it will undercut them on price.
