Volvo has decided to eliminate half of its Czech sales. It has done away with diesels, even though they are clearly its most popular engines

Volvo has been threatening to do so for a long time, but now they have actually done it – in the photos you can see the brand’s last manufactured diesel car. What sense this makes when diesel engines can continue to be offered and continue to dominate its sales forcefully, we have no idea.

If we were to look for the car company that thinks most dogmatically and ostentatiously ignores the preferences of its own customers when it comes to the choice of drives for its cars, Volvo would be among the hot candidates. Although he sees the same reality as us, in which he appeals to electric models of units of one percent of customers (we had 3.7% last year), he publicly shows that he is not interested at all and insists that he will continue to offer what he wants . So it will end with diesels, end with petrols, end with hybrids and in 6 years will only sell electric cars.

Only time will tell whether this more or less suicidal plan will come to an end, but it has indeed taken the first step. Although the end of diesels was threatened for years, it never really came to an end, and even this year people could happily buy them. This is no longer the case, the automaker announced that after 45 years of continuous production of diesel cars, it has stopped their production and sent photos to the media of what is said to be the brand’s very last diesel, which will end up in the company museum.

Already in February, the last Volvo V60 with a diesel engine had rolled off the line in Ghent, Belgium, and now it has been joined by what is said to be the last XC90 with the same drive, which was produced at the factory in Torslanda, Sweden. As we already mentioned, the car will not be given to any of the brand’s customers, but will end up in the World of Volvo, the company’s museum in Gothenburg, where it will serve as a symbol of the end of the diesel era that began for the brand in 1979. At that time, the carmaker gave the 244 GL D6 model with a six-cylinder diesel unit, a big premiere in a passenger car at the time.

If it was a reaction to the weak interest in these engines, it would be possible to wave with a smile and look forward to “better next time”, but it is not even a mistake. Even though diesels have been phased out of the range of many other models in previous years, they have remained an absolutely dominating choice for Volvo in many markets. This also applies to the Czech Republic, where this year, according to SDA data, the automaker sold a total of 739 cars, of which 357 were equipped with a diesel engine. Even if you didn’t pay much attention to math in your youth, you can hardly fail to notice that it accounts for almost half of all brand sales (48.3%). In the case of the XC90, it is 82.6% of sales, 171 out of 207 cars delivered.

Considering that this is the case after years of falling back on diesel supply and just before the end of supply of any diesel Volvos, it’s clear that the natural interest in these units is even higher among people. The Swedes must know this even better than we do, yet they look out the window and ask the question: “What would we stop selling?” he replies: “Diesels!”

It is a shameful decision, intolerable from the customer’s point of view, which the clients of the brand should return to the car company with interest. Sing whose bread you eat – Volvo likes this and believes that it will make customers act according to its ideas. This should not be tolerated in the market. Let’s add that although Volvo diesels are in a worse position on a global scale, mainly due to the USA and China, they are still doing very well in Europe and their sales have even been growing recently. And not only here, according to data from the German KBA, 1,742 out of 5,213 buyers bought diesel Volvos from our western neighbors this year, i.e. more than a third of them, with the XC60 and XC90 models accounting for more than half of them. The Swedes dare to delete this without having to? It seems a bit far-fetched, but who wants to go…

This is said to be the last diesel Volvo ever made. We will see if the car manufacturer sticks to this decision, but if so, it should be backfired on at least some buyers, so absurd arbitrary decisions should not be tolerated in a functioning market. Photo: Volvo

Sources: Volvo, SDA, KBA

Peter Miller

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