Volvo ES90 is a zero-emissions take on the S90.
Volvo is gearing up to launch a new ES90 electric sedan later this year, according to pictures and information leaked online. Swedish motoring magazine Teknikens Varld says the first pre-production examples have been built, suggesting that we may soon see the cars testing on public roads.
The details come after an image was allegedly shared on Volvo’s internal intranet system, showing a car covered by a sheet, surrounded by employees at one of the brand factories in China. The banner above the car read: ‘Volvo Cars V551 First VP Car Celebration’ – V551 being the ES90’s internal code name, and VP signifying this is a verification model.
According to the Teknikens Varld story, Goran Larsson, technical lead for the V551 project said, “VP car construction takes us one step closer to delivering a new, finished car to our customers. As a real car we can touch and use it for tests, it plays a decisive role in the development process.”
We can’t decipher anything further from the single covered image, though we know the as-yet-unnamed model will act as a successor to the S90 sedan.
Volvo is committed to an electric-only future. In 2022 it announced it’ll reveal “one fully electric car each year”. By 2030, the company will sell only fully electric cars, which it says is “crucial to [Volvo’s} ambition to be a climate-neutral company by 2040”.
This bold plan started with the EX90, and was followed by the smaller EX30 in 2023. The China-only EM90 electric MPV can be considered a “bonus” model, according to a Volvo spokesperson – an additional variant not revealed in line with Volvo’s global promise. Next up is the ES90, which we expect to see in full later this year.
The ES90 will sit on the same SPA2 platform as the EX90 SUV, with the saloon likely to measure almost five metres in length. That means it’ll sit between the old S90 and the long-wheelbase version of the same car. However, due to the new model’s electric-specific architecture, we can expect space in the back seats of the ES90 to surpass that offered in its predecessor.
Chief rivals for the ES90 include the existing BMW i5 and Mercedes EQE, as well as the forthcoming Audi A6 e-tron. Expect a raft of Chinese brands to also benchmark the Volvo in the not-to-distant future; Nio, for example, has bold plans for Europe, based around its innovative battery-swap technology.
An estate version of the ES90 – presumably called EV90 – will join the range at a later date, offering all the same specs but with a bigger, more family-friendly boot.