Minimalist Vehicle Architecture Serves Volvo, Geely

LOS ANGELES – Volvo started developing its Scalable Product Architecture in 2008, when the Swedish automaker knew Ford was going to sell it and it no longer would have access to Ford’s platforms. Now SPA, as the platform is known, underpins one Volvo model and is destined to support all the automaker’s larger vehicles.

Though Volvo now is owned by Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, there are no current plans to share the SPA platform with its Chinese parent, Lex Kerssemakers, president and CEO-Volvo Cars of North America, tells WardsAuto at the Los Angeles auto show.

“We are part of a group, so I don’t know about the future,” he says.

There were doubters when Geely acquired Volvo in 2010. Surely Zhejiang Geely founder and owner Shufu Li would interfere with Volvo’s operations, dragging down the brand’s quality and its reputation along with it, skeptics said. But the unlikely pairing has given the Swedish automaker freedom to pursue a bold strategy based on fewer platforms and engine types.

“From day one, they left Volvo alone,” Kerssemakers says of Volvo’s Chinese owner. “We look back after five years and both parties have flourished.”

SPA is a good example of the two brands’ independent yet supportive relationship. Geely can utilize on the platform if it wants, but “it is a pretty upscale platform,” Kerssemakers says. “Geely needs to decide if they want to go that direction.”

All future Volvo models will be based on just two platforms: SPA and a small-car architecture Volvo is jointly developing with Geely in Sweden.  The development team is a separate unit, housed “outside our fences,” Kerssemakers says. A Swedish manager runs the unit.

The Compact Modular Architecture platform both companies are developing may share “a few elements” with SPA, says Kerssemakers, “but not too many.”

Geely will be the first to utilize the CMA platform, producing a small crossover SUV for export beginning in 2016. Volvo gradually will shift all its small cars onto the CMA platform as well.

Keeping It Simple – And Profitable

Volvo currently offers only 4-cyl. engines in its vehicles. “People ask me, ‘How can you as a company selling 500,000 units make money?’” Kerssemakers says. “Because we have one engine family.”

There are plans to add a 3-cyl. engine in future CMA-based models. “The engine bay is looking very similar in both platforms,” Kerssemakers notes.  Another key money saver – the firewall, a safety feature that separates the engine from a vehicle’s driver and passengers – is fixed in both platforms.

That’s a big change from Volvo’s days as a part of Ford. “We are coming from a period where we had tons of different engine installations,” Kerssemakers says.

Both the SPA and CMA platforms are easily adaptable to plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles. That fits in well with Geely’s recently announced “Blue Geely” initiative. The eco-friendly car-development program calls for 90% of the Chinese automaker’s sales to consist of PHEV and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles by 2020. More immediately, it plans to sell plug-in electric vehicles for the same price as combustion-engine models.

Geely’s plan is ambitious. “2020 is soon,” Kerssemakers says. But Geely can “copy and paste” Volvo technology to help it achieve its goal, he says. “At some point, we will copy and paste from Geely.”

Volvo doesn’t plan to move as quickly on electrification as Geely. “I strongly believe there will still be a world for combustion engines after 2020,” Kerssemakers says. But the market will decide, and with the scalable SPA platform “we can go either direction,” he says.

Kerssemakers sees Geely’s move as similar to Volvo’s 2012 announcement it would offer only 4-cyl. and smaller engines on future models, and that it would extend electrification across its entire portfolio.

“We had the same point of view that Geely is taking now,” says Kerssemakers. “Put a stake in the ground and say, ‘This is where we are going.’”