People who work at Volvo will remember 2025 as either a year when they had to start over or a year when things went very badly. The Swedish car company’s sales dropped 14% around the world in July. From the second quarter of 2025 to July, they lost more than $1 billion worldwide. In June and May, sales fell 12% year-over-year, and in the first seven months of the year, they fell 10% overall. You don’t have to be an investor to see that the numbers are going down. Volvo says they have taken steps to lessen the damage, but they don’t have much hope. On the one hand, the business cut 3,000 jobs around the world. To bypass tariffs, the company has chosen to produce the XC60—its top-selling SUV in North America—at its Ridgeville, South Carolina facility. The only thing that worries me is that the XC60 won’t be made until 2027. If everything goes as planned, the XC90 will come out a year after them. All of this will have happened by the time we have a new government and a presidential election. The EX90, Volvo’s top-of-the-line electric car, has had a rough start. Consumer Reports identified numerous safety concerns with this SUV, which costs at least $81,290. Their experience with the EX90 did not live up to Volvo’s reputation for quality. For example, the blind spot warning sirens go off even when the car is stationary, the third-row seats are hard to fold down because the motors are too hot, and the audio system stops working all of a sudden. The strong EX30, on the other hand, has been delayed several times and finally hit dealers earlier this year for about $10,000 more than what was originally mentioned. The government’s rush to raise tariffs is not Volvo’s fault, but it is another problem for the company at a tough time. With global sales of fully electric vehicles declining by 23% from January to July, there may be a need to rebalance the mix between hybrids and fully electric models. During the same period in 2025, sales of internal combustion engine vehicles and mild hybrids fell by 7%. Sales of plug-in hybrids, on the other hand, were down less than a percent. Whatever Volvo makes in the future to stop this trend will be different from what the company has already shown. Even though the ES90 is a sedan, its higher ride height is not a mistake. It’s now mostly an SUV brand, and Volvo’s recently retired CEO thinks the company would do better to add different trim packages to well-known models like the XC60 instead of making a completely new car that only a few people would want. Let’s say that’s what Volvo is now. But it is still necessary to fully execute these parts, which include the software that runs them.
