Håkan Samuelsson was a relatively late convert to electric cars. He took over as boss of Volvo in 2012, but it was only three or four years later that he realised he needed to oversee the biggest shift in the company’s history: ending the use of fossil fuels.
Since then, Volvo has committed to making no more petrol or diesel cars after 2030. That will be the fastest phase-out of any traditional carmaker of equivalent size, and Volvo has put sustainability at the heart of its branding.
Samuelsson was persuaded by “absolute engineering type of logic”, he tells the Observer via video call from a sparsely furnished office in Volvo’s Gothenburg headquarters. Batteries are the most efficient way to transform sun or wind energy into power to turn the wheels of a car. But it was Tesla founder Elon Musk, automotive disrupter par excellence, who really piled on the pressure.
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CV
Age 71
Family Two adult children.
Education Studied mechanical engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, which was “very fancy”.
Pay £5m in 2020.
Last holiday To his home north of Barcelona in Spain.
Best advice he’s been given “Don’t have this career planning; do something you really like doing, because then you will do it well.”
Biggest career mistake “That list would be so long, it would take a whole section of your newspaper,” he says, before highlighting two: not being “diplomatic” enough when making a bid for Scania when he was leading Man Trucks; and not realising earlier that electric carmakers would need their own supplies of batteries.
Word he overuses “Goes without saying – I use that often and maybe it is not so obvious for other people.”
How he relaxes Reading history and economics books, including Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations recently, doing DIY at home, and going to the dump.
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“You have to admit that Tesla inspired us all, by showing that, wow, this can be done in a premium car,” Samuelsson says. “The guys in California put the spotlight on electrification, and there were people saying it would not work and they would go bankrupt. But gradually, it came up, ‘no, this works’, and you tested those cars and there’s nothing wrong with them. They really are better than a combustion car: silent, and with super acceleration.”
It would, he adds, be “stupid to try to resist” the push to all-electric. And as Volvo’s electric cars will be cheaper to make than petrol or diesel by 2025, there will be little reason for companies to make internal combustion engines after that.
Setting Volvo on the route to electric, via a £13bn flotation on Stockholm’s stock exchange last October, has turned out to be the 71-year-old’s final move as CEO as he heads into a quasi-retirement that could have come a decade earlier.
Samuelsson has taken a carmaker that in 2012 was selling about 400,000 cars a year and just about breaking even to record profits and revenues on sales just shy of 700,000 in 2021.
One of his top priorities when joining was to take full control of the manufacturing platform for every car rather than relying on other carmakers – “no Ford Mondeos with another body”. He also ordered a design rethink to make Volvos “less boxy and boring”.
Another key aim was a drive for stronger profitability. “If you work in a company losing money, it destroys the whole energy,” he says. “You need profits to boost morale. So I said, no, it has to be turned around quicker. So we have never lost any money.”
Volvos may have become less boxy on his watch, but they also became bigger. The streets of many western cities – where off-road ability is hardly a must – are increasingly taken up by sports utility vehicles (SUVs) that hog space and use more fuel. In 2019, the International Energy Agency in 2019 found that SUVs were the second-biggest cause of rising global carbon emissions between 2010 and 2018.
Samuelsson, whose English maintains a steady, unhurried rhythm throughout the conversation, does not skip a beat when asked about his part in this: “You need also to be profitable to have money for the investments,” he says. Customers have freely chosen to go for bigger cars, so that was the best way to afford the giant outlays needed to develop electric technology.
The changes did not go entirely smoothly, however. In 2020, shortly before the pandemic hit, Samuelsson was tasked by Volvo’s Chinese owner, Geely, with drafting plans for a merger with Geely Automobile that would have created a global Chinese carmaker along with Britain’s Lotus Cars. A year later, Geely instead settled for its carmakers listing separately and sharing electric vehicle technology and software.
Samuelsson says Geely owner Li Shufu, who also goes by Eric, “never micromanaged” or pressured Volvo to hit quarterly targets, but there is little doubt that Li’s influence was behind a push that saw annual Volvo sales in China rise from about 1,000 to 170,000 during his time there. He acknowledges that Li was a “door opener”.
Samuelsson grew up south of Stockholm, son of a workshop manager, so it was perhaps not a surprise that he ended up studying mechanical engineering. He points out that in the 1970s, automotive manufacturing was the most glamorous industry going: “In those days, mechanical engineering was more or less what software or digital development is today. It was cars and motorcycles and carburettors. That was hi-tech.”
A traineeship at Swedish lorrymaker Scania was the start of a lifetime in the automotive industry. He spent 20 years making lorries, including stints in Argentina and Brazil, before being headhunted to join German lorry and diesel engine maker MAN Group. (Samuelsson also sold off large parts of MAN’s sprawling conglomerate, including a declining business making newspaper printing presses.)
Samuelsson has handed the Volvo reins to Jim Rowan, former chief executive of Britain’s Dyson, the vacuum cleaner maker which also had plans – now abandoned – to build an electric car.
In the short term he is heading to Tel Aviv for some time off over the spring, but the plan is to continue to work in the industry, so his will not be a “sit down and play golf” retirement. (He may find time to renovate his vintage Volvo P1800 – the car driven by a pre-James Bond Roger Moore in The Saint, a spy series that aired during Samuelsson’s childhood.)
One key task will be chairing the board of Polestar, the electric vehicle company started by Volvo. He is also in discussions about other board positions in the automotive field, but won’t be drawn further.
Being chief executive of a major company comes with handsome rewards – Samuelsson was paid £5m in 2020 – but he is does not hesitate when asked about the costs of such a high-powered career.
“You always lose something” he says. “I think you should see it more as having a job where you are passionate, and happy having it as a total hobby.
When it comes to the personal costs of the job, he admits he “lost a lot of other things” and “probably also should have spent more time with my kids and family. They say that I was travelling a lot and they never saw me when they were small. You feel a bit bad hearing that.
“I didn’t realise it when it happened, but I probably neglected a bit my family. But in life you cannot do everything. So, I don’t regret putting in so much time as a CEO. It was worth it still.”
• This article was amended on 27 March 2022 to correct the figure for Håkan Samuelsson’s pay in 2020, which was £5m, not £19m as an earlier version said.
