‘We need to deliver history and culture.’ Volvo’s design chief, Thomas Ingenlath, on how the carmaker plans to not only survive, but go premium

The global car market is in the midst of a huge upheaval. Chinese electric-vehicle (EV) manufacturers have eaten away at the sales of established Western brands to the point that giants including Volkswagen are laying off tens of thousands of workers. The EU has responded by raising import duties, relaxing its climate commitments and even threatening to exclude Chinese companies from the bloc entirely – which the US has already done. So where does that leave smaller legacy European brands such as Volvo, whose position is further complicated by the fact that it has been majority-owned by Chinese automotive group Geely (which also owns EV brands Zeekr and Lynk & Co) since 2010?

The Gothenburg-based company celebrates its 100th anniversary next year and is planning to launch an unprecedented 13 new models to celebrate. “When you sit in a car like this, you realise the strength in having a design heritage,” says its chief design officer, Thomas Ingenlath, as he prepares to weave a bright-orange 1975 Volvo 242DL through the Gothenburg traffic. “Developing a brand in an evolutionary way is totally different from starting with a blank page.” The 62-year-old German has done both – as the CEO of Geely stablemate Polestar and, prior to that, as the vice-president of design at Volvo, where he returned this year. His job now is to evoke the brand’s history without resorting to retro; ensure the survival of a European brand within a Chinese group, while competing with other companies both within and without it; and continue the transition to electric at a time when European efforts appear to be stalling. Volvo once pledged to be all-electric by 2030. Now it hopes to be “over 90 per cent”.

Ingenlath has returned to Volvo at the same time as its CEO, Håkan Samuelsson. Is this the car world’s equivalent of the Oasis reunion? “Hmm, not so many arguments,” he says with a laugh. They are certainly reuniting at an interesting moment. Chinese companies enjoy highly beneficial conditions in terms of government support, environmental frameworks and labour rules. Ingenlath points out that there were the same kinds of accusations when Japanese cars arrived in Europe in the 1970s. “But the competition has to be fair,” he adds.

Monocle meets the man responsible for some of the most elegantly proportioned cars of recent decades, epitomised by his 2013 Volvo Coupe Concept, at his favourite coffee shop in central Gothenburg. The plan is to take a drive out of the city, before ending up at a “top-secret” warehouse used to store 300 cars from every era of Volvo’s history. Do car buyers even care about brands any more? “My children are still very aware of brands – in luxury goods, in fashion and also in cars,” he says. “It is not some shallow advertising thing. It is about the values that you deliver.”

Ingenlath cites brands such as Rolex and Louis Vuitton that excel at adding value through design. “We have to go premium,” he says. “We made that jump in perception with the XC90 12 years ago. In Sweden, there is still an attitude that a Volvo is a car of the people but in America the XC90 made it a prestige brand. That’s what we have to do to survive. Now, we have to go more and more to electric cars.” The challenge here is that EV technology has also affected a key element of a car’s appearance. “They don’t require as much cooling so everyone has decided that they don’t need a grille. That means you lose the ‘face’ of the car.” Ingenlath can’t divulge too much about Volvo’s near-future but a new face will be revealed next year to mark the centenary.

We are now heading out towards the Kattegat Coast, close to where Ingenlath and his family have lived for 14 years. “Gothenburg is great because you can be out in nature in just a few minutes but it’s still a big industrial city,” he says. He spent last year commuting to Geely’s design centre in Shanghai, which he still visits every three weeks or so. Geely’s long-term position as majority shareholder might make Volvo seem like a Chinese Trojan horse but Gothenburg still produces more cars than any other Volvo plant. And though they benefit from parent-company technology, the technological traffic goes two ways. “Geely has a big safety centre in China, which is inspired by the safety centre that we have here,” he says.

In Ingenlath’s homeland, Volkswagen’s crisis is highly political. Things are different in Sweden. “The tradition here is not to interfere,” he says as we head back into the city. “An industry needs to be strong enough to survive on its own.” Soon, we’re not far from the Volvo plant, which has the capacity to produce 300,000 cars a year of the company’s annual production of some 700,000 cars.

Most of the cars that Monocle sees in Gothenburg seem to be Volvos and we half-expect the traffic to part for our highly visible icon – but we have to wait our turn at junctions. Arriving at the secret warehouse, we find 300 or so cars from the past 100 years: production models, show cars and competition heroes. It’s a fitting place to end a discussion about the brand’s values and future. “We have to fight for our existence,” says Ingenlath. “We need to deliver history and culture. This is a 100-year-old company with incredible values. I would love that to continue in the next century.”