I am handed the keys inside a huge subterranean garage, like a vast museum of Volvo’s past and future. Under tailored tarpaulins, or just resting moodily, historic models stand side by side with the latest beasts to roll off the production line a short distance away. And here, glowering from the shadows, is an onyx-black Volvo XC90 T6 Inscription, Volvo’s premium SUV. Mine for a whole week! ‘Just bring it back in one piece,’ says a technician as he waves me away.
I am behind the wheel of an iconic Swedish brand. ‘Made by Sweden’ says the advertising slogan. But just a few years previously, Volvo had been bought by an upstart Chinese firm called Geely. After billions of investments in new components and factories, the XC90 was the company’s first all-new model under its new owners. There was a great deal riding on its success. The feeling among senior Volvo executives was that they were not just launching a new model, ‘they were in effect launching a new company’, the Financial Times reported. Within two years of its first appearance in 2014, one in five of the cars sold by Volvo was an XC90. Falling oil prices and rising driver appetite had led to a surge in global SUV sales, accounting for a quarter of cars sold by all automobile-makers across Europe. ‘We have taken a step into the premium league,’ Volvo announced.
Profits were up, and the XC90 was a major contributor. The XC90 is ‘the ultimate proof’ of the takeover’s success, said Volvo’s US boss. Under the new owners ‘there is an eagerness to show that we are incredibly good at making cars. We are the leading ones again, we will show we can make the best cars in the world. The result is the XC90, which is beating the shit out of the competition.’
But my first impression of the car is an anti-climax. I am not a car person; I prefer a bicycle or a boat. Cars have four wheels and an engine and they get me from A to B – who cares if they are big or small, premium or Prius? I have managed most of my life without owning one at all. But here I am driving just another car, even if it’s a big one. I feel self-conscious. What will the neighbours think of this ostentatious symbol of personal wealth that has suddenly appeared outside our house? What does it say about the sort of person I am? Someone with money to burn, I suppose. And a small penis. Enormous cars with darkened windows like this are driven by gangsters in Moscow, not wimpy journalists.
And then, slowly, I begin to understand. Nought to 60mph in around six seconds. It feels like I am driving a sports car the size of an armoured personnel carrier. My younger brother-in-law, who is faster and sharper than me at everything sporty, tries to race me from a standing start in his VW Polo. Within moments he is a small speck in my rear-view mirror. Other drivers appear to be scared. I begin to recognise the precise moment they see me coming up behind them – a small swerve of panic as their instinctive reaction is to get out of the way. And then they get out of the way.
I begin to feel that I own the road. I go through a red light without noticing; the car that has right of way gives a brief and half-hearted beep on his horn, it is almost apologetic. I have priority. The French consumer psychologist Clotaire Rapaille, who worked for Chrysler in the 1990s, developed an analysis of how SUVs appeal to people’s most primitive instincts. Drawing on the work of Carl Jung, Rapaille divided people’s reactions to a commercial product into three levels of brain activity: the cortex, for intellectual assessments; the limbic, for emotional responses; and the reptilian, which he defined as reactions based on ‘survival and reproduction’. He concluded that SUVs are ‘the most reptilian vehicles of all’ because their imposing, even menacing, appearance appeals to people’s deep-seated desires for survival and reproduction.
The 1992 Jeep Grand Cherokee was a result of Rapaille’s work, as was the Dodge Ram Pickup two years later. These cars would make other motorists want to get out of your way. Rapaille said: ‘My theory is the reptilian always wins. The reptilian says, “If there is a crash, I want the other guy to die.” Of course, I can’t say that aloud.’ To Rapaille, the Hummer SUV, based on the design of a military truck, was an embodiment of Social Darwinism, sending out a clear signal: ‘Don’t mess with me because I can crush you.’
Sociological studies of SUV drivers show they exhibit more risky behaviour on the road, an ‘SUV effect’, according to which drivers violate traffic lights, don’t wear seat belts and drive while using their mobile phones. Instead of making roads safer for all motorists, you make them safer for the individual motorist by placing them inside a small tank. Geographer Stephen Graham sees the SUV as an expression of a ‘new urban militarism’, which uses war as ‘the dominant metaphor in describing the perpetual and boundless condition of urban societies – at war against drugs, against crime, against terror, against insecurity itself.’
Behind the wheel of an XC90, I feel my primitive, reptilian instincts come alive. I am a winner, a conqueror – impregnable – stronger, bigger, faster, better. In short, I have become someone I used to despise. I am burning twice as much petrol as a Prius, and the car costs more than twice as much to buy. But wow, it feels great! And not particularly ‘Swedish’, either: ostentatious luxury, dodgy environmental credentials, and more than a hint of macho. How did Volvo ever get away with appropriating the male gender symbol – that circle with the phallic arrow – for its corporate logo?
Nonetheless, the XC90 seems like an appropriate metaphor for the new Swedish model that emerged from the economic crisis of the 1990s. It is a victory of Swedish consensual manufacturing methods over cheap labour and orders from the top; and at the same time a victory for a Chinese entrepreneur’s ruthless focus on a profitable market segment. A success for Swedish principles of safety, quality and style, yet also a triumph of hard-nosed marketing to a reptilian demographic that eschews modesty and demands luxury in spades.
From 2019, the XC90 is available only as a hybrid that runs on both batteries and petrol. Similarly, the new Swedish model of the millennium’s third decade will be a hybrid, a mix of pre-1990s industrial pragmatism with the globalised realities of the 21st century. ‘Made by Sweden’, but by a company owned in China.
The story of Volvo is instructive because it represents an extreme clash of economic cultures in which Sweden came out on top, benefiting both the company and its Chinese owners. History has many examples of invaders adopting the cultures of the conquered rather than imposing their own ways, whether it’s the Vikings converting to Christianity in Britain, or the Manchu adopting aspects of Chinese culture after the fall of the Ming dynasty. In assimilating Volvo, however, China’s corporate raiders were clear from the start – they would let Swedes be Swedes, and Chinese be Chinese.
As we shall see in the next three chapters, it is also just a rollicking good story.