Volvos in Europe
2019 Volvo V60 on display at Copenhagen Airport in Denmark
Heading into a two-week trip to Europe and the Baltics, I was looking forward to many of the same things other tourists get excited about. Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, the Globe theater and the Churchill War Rooms in London. The Hermitage and Summer Palace in St. Petersburg. The medieval cities of Tallinn, Estonia, and Visby, Sweden. The charming ports of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Helsinki, Finland. And the open air museum, Skansen, in the Swedish capital of Stockholm. But I also had a less common item on my list. I was eager to observe Volvos in their native element. Particularly Sweden.
We weren’t going to Gothenburg, home of Volvo’s headquarters, as part of this trip. Still, I reasoned that Volvos would be much more plentiful in Europe than they are in the US.
Actually, they aren’t. Or at least it didn’t seem that way. Sure, they were noticeably more of them per capita in Stockholm than there were in London, but it’s not like every second or third car in Stockholm carried the iconic Volvo logo on its front grill. Volvo is indeed the sales leader in Sweden, where it sold 69,943 vehicles in 2018, for a 19.8% share of the market. But VW was close on its heels with 53,471 sales, for a 15.1% market share. Numbers dropped off sharply after that, with Kia in third place with 23,045 sales and 6.5% of the market, followed by Toyota and BMW.
But VWs, BMWs and Toyotas are as common as dandelions in the cities we visited—as are Mercedes-Benz sedans and wagons. It’s not surprising, I guess, when you consider how much bigger those companies are than Volvo. In 2018, Toyota sold 8.1 million vehicles and VW sold 6.7 million, ranking first and second globally, according to research firm JATO. Mercedes sold 2.6 million vehicles and BMW 2.1 million—good for 10th and 12th places, respectively. Volvo sold just 642,253 vehicles globally in 2018, which didn’t even place it in the world’s top 25. (China’s Baojun, a joint venture between General Motors, SAIC Motor and Liuzhou Wuling Motors, ranked 25th by selling 879,077 vehicles.)
Other interesting auto-related observations during our trip:
· BMWs and Mercedes are commonly used as taxis in Europe. Don’t see much of that in the U.S.
· London’s traditional black taxis (also called hackneys, or hackney carriages), aren’t always black today, but they are still delightfully quirky. They can hold up to four passengers, two on the rear bench and two on jump seats facing the rear bench. Luggage goes on the floor where the front passenger seat would otherwise be, which in the UK is on the left side of the vehicle. The taxis are expensive to use. We paid about $32 to have a hackney take us from Heathrow International to our airport hotel on the return leg of our trip, then about half that to have an Uber take us back to the airport the next morning.
· The Volvo XC90 is a big vehicle for Europe. I remember watching a video review of the SUV by a British reviewer on YouTube. The reviewer couldn’t get over how big the SUV is. Coming from a GMC Yukon XL Denali (cousin to the Chevy Suburban), I didn’t think of the XC90 quite in those terms. But it’s true that you don't see many passenger vehicles bigger than the XC90 in Europe.