Volvo to kill off diesels globally by early 2024

From 2024 diesel will be dead to Volvo, with the Swedish automaker planning to produce its final ever car powered by a compression ignition engine early next year.

When the final diesel Volvo trundles down the line, the Swedish marque will be one of the first legacy brands to make the transition away from diesel.

Today’s announcement at Climate Week NYC is not unexpected, as Volvo has previously stated it is planning to be a fully electric automaker by 2030, and is aiming to be carbon neutral by 2040.

In Australia, the company has an even more aggressive target: it’s planning to be EV only by 2026.

Locally Volvo dropped diesels from its range in 2022, and the UK followed suit this year. In these two markets, as well as the US and China, Volvo sells only plug-in hybrid and mild hybrid cars with petrol engines, or pure electric vehicles.

Volvo says that as recently as 2019, diesel-powered cars represented a majority of its sales in Europe. According to Reuters, in 2022 diesel vehicles accounted for just 8.9 per cent of Volvo’s European volume.

The news wire also understands that 33 per cent of Volvo’s sales in August were EV or plug-in hybrid.

This reflects a wider trend across the Continent with diesel cars plummeting in popularity in the wake of the Volkswagen Group’s Dieselgate emissions cheating scandal.

As we reportedly recently, pure electric vehicles overtook diesel for the first time across Europe in July 2023. In that month, diesel vehicles accounted for just 13.4 per cent of sales, down from over 50 per cent in 2015.

Volvo’s transition away from petrol and diesel engines began in 2019, when it merged its internal combustion engine development and production operations with those of parent Geely to create Aurobay. Volvo sold its stake in Aurobay in November 2022.

In a prepared statement, the company said, “We’re no longer spending a single krona of our R&D budget on developing new internal combustion engines”.

Recently Volvo launched its first two electric only models, the EX90 and EX30 crossovers. It also sells electric versions of the XC40 and C40 crossovers.