Our journey starts in Copenhagen, because no journey that takes in a drive across the dramatic Oresund bridge should be passed-up. The 12km combination of bridge and tunnel that takes you from the Copenhagen ring road to the shores of Sweden might not be the longest and biggest bridge in the world, but on a crystal, crisp winter’s day it sure is a dramatic sight through the windscreen.
Upon leaving Copenhagen – always a sad moment, as it’s a wonderful city – you drop down into a tunnel, which eventually leads you up and out, passing under the light strobing through chunky, square-edged concrete spars, until you’re out and on to the suspension bridge section. That bridge has towers that reach 204 metres above the surface of the Oresund Strait itself, while the road on which we’re driving is 57 metres above the waves, which are thankfully not very wavy today. In fact, it’s flat calm.
The Oresund crossing has been in place since 2000, so it possibly shouldn’t feel quite so dramatic to use it, but somehow – especially to those of us whose island makes us board either a sluggish ferry or a cramped 737 if we want to go somewhere else – it still seems to be impossibly glamorous to be able to drive across a bridge and reach another country.
The bridge itself, of course, is probably more famous for its starring role in downbeat, depressing Scandi noir drama series The Bridge – a dead body is left on the mid-point of the bridge, meaning that the case has to be investigated by antagonistic detectives from both Denmark and Sweden. As seems to be the case with all current detective dramas, it’s all a bit dark and miserable (bring back Columbo, I say) although car nuts will appreciate detective Saga Norén’s gorgeous 1977 Porsche 911S (which sold at auction a few years back for a chunky £125,000 (€148,000).
Today, we’re swerving the gloomy shadows of crime solving and heading for something rather more wholesome. For that matter, we’re also bypassing the Museum of Disgusting Food in Malmö, the Swedish town to which the Oresund first brings you. Alas, we’re not driving Norén’s 911 either, but we are driving something rather more appropriate.
With a full charge in its 82kWh battery, the Volvo EX40 is carrying us effortlessly across the Oresund in beautiful silence. What’s an EX40? Why, it’s the familiar XC40 SUV, on sale since 2017, but rebadged for the electric world, an electric world which Volvo seems to be navigating rather better than some others.
While the Swedish car maker – long since part of the Chinese Geely Motors group – was one of the first out of the traps, post-pandemic, to announce that it would become an electric-only brand by the end of the decade, as with almost all other car brands, Volvo has recently had a bit of a rethink.
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Having originally expected to be an electric-only brand by 2030, Volvo has recently said that now it expects to be only 90 per cent electric by then. “We are resolute in our belief that our future is electric,” Jim Rowan, chief executive of Volvo, said in September. “However, it is clear that the transition to electrification will not be linear, and customers and markets are moving at different speeds.”
Volvo’s bet-hedging seems to be working. While its compact and affordable EX30 all-electric crossover has been a big success, keeping its plug-in hybrid and mild-hybrid models on sale has clearly helped too, and all throughout 2024 Volvo has been reporting increases in its global sales, at a time when many bigger rivals are struggling and facing deep financial crises.
It’s also a company not afraid to take a big engineering swing once in a while. The EX40 that’s now crossed the Swedish border and is heading steadily north-west started life as a front-wheel drive XC40 Recharge, but last year Volvo decided that front-wheel drive and electric power wasn’t the most efficient way to do things, and so switched the motor to the back of the car, driving the rear wheels, and gave the XC40 a bigger battery at the same time, justifying the new badge of EX40.
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It’s a really lovely thing to drive, too – smooth and refined, with exceptionally good seats (always a Volvo touchstone, that) and I even love the colour. ‘Sand Dune’ is a warm, metallic shade that has just enough traditional Volvo beige in it to raise a faint smile. Also charming is the plastic trim on the dash, which looks plain (and even cheap) by day, but which is beautifully backlit at night to reveal a cool relief-map motif. Something to keep your spirits up on those long Scandi winter nights.
Raising slightly less of a smile is the range, which even with the greater efficiencies of rear-wheel drive is struggling to get above 420km today, against a claim of 573km. Blame the freezing weather – it’s 5°C outside, and with wind-chill it’s more like a flat zero.
Certainly, in more clement conditions, 500km should be possible, but at least charging in Sweden and Denmark is rather easier than in Ireland. There are multiple high-powered chargers at almost every fuel stop, and not once do we have to contend with a broken charge point, nor have to queue.
A quick stop has the EX40 topped up and back on the road, but where are we going? We’re going to the World ...
You see, Volvo’s old car museum, which used to be in the Gothenburg suburb of Arendal, was a very traditional car museum. A big, square building with lots of cars on display. Clearly, it was interesting – 100,000 visitors a year can’t be wrong, right? – but it was all a bit samey-samey if you’d seen any of the other major car museums.
Volvo wanted to do something better, so last year it opened a new home for the brand’s history, this time in downtown Gothenburg, and called it World of Volvo.
Deposited by EX40, we grab a ticket – €19 for adults, €12 for kids up to 12, and kids under six go free – and wander in. Immediately, this is clearly no ordinary museum.
For a start, almost all of the surfaces that you see inside are wooden. Indeed, World of Volvo seems, from inside, almost to have grown rather than been built, with a vast wooden central structure reaching up from the ground, and spreading out to form the roof as if it were a giant tree.
Equally, this isn’t really a museum. World of Volvo is at least equally a space for meetings and conferences – and indeed for eating, with a gorgeous restaurant looking out over Gothenburg from behind vast windows. The gift shop, normally avariciously placed between you and the exit door, is tucked discreetly away. There aren’t even that many cars on display, which may seem disappointing to the true car nuts, but it’s the quality of what’s on show here, not the quantity, that counts.
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Downstairs, in the lobby, we come across something very rare – a 1933 Volvo 655 with a stunning, swooping convertible body designed by Swedish coachbuilder Norrmalm, one of only two built. Its six-cylinder engine may produce only 65hp, but you could easily imagine a more sensible, Swedish version of Jay Gatsby driving a car that looks this good.
Across from this Art Deco rarity, there’s something rather more thrilling for the 1970s-born kid in me – a bright red Volvo 244 saloon, the classic big Volvo brick, once owned by Pehr Gyllenhammar, Volvo’s longest-serving chief executive who ran the company from 1971 to 1993. ‘PG’ had this 244 modified by fitting it with an early version of the 155hp turbo four-cylinder engine, giving the car rapid (for the time) 0-100km/h acceleration of 9.0 seconds, as well as the custom fire-engine red paint job. It looks fabulous, and even though it’s one of the first cars I see in the place, by the end of the day it’s the one I most want to take home.
There are further joys upstairs, though. An example of the very first Volvo – a 28hp OV4, built in 1927 – is on display, complete with the mea culpa tale of the first cars being fitted with their back axles the wrong way around, so they could only be driven in reverse to get them out of the factory. Quality control has improved a bit since then.
Wandering around the bright and airy exhibition space – no car museum I’ve ever been in has used this much natural light – you’re struck by a few things. First, Volvo is at least as proud of its truck-making heritage as its cars. Second, the 1960s Volvo 121 Amazon saloon never gets the credit it deserves for being a truly gorgeous piece of car design. And third, the canary yellow 240hp 850 T5-R from 1991 is suddenly challenging Mr Gyllenhammar’s red 244 Turbo as the one I want to take home. There’s also a little look at an imperfect future past, with a tiny prototype electric car from 1976 which had just 13hp and a range of 50km.
Of course, you’re also struck by the stories. Volvo is still synonymous with safety, something that the brand really leans into, with a series of stark head-and-shoulder portraits of people from around the world who reckon they wouldn’t be alive today had they not been driving a car from Gothenburg. Probably the most striking is the tale of Kathy, whose Volvo was hit from the side and rear when an armed maniac being chased by the police tried to carjack her. The absconding criminal even opened fire at one point. As Kathy starkly puts it: “Volvo saved our lives [she was travelling with her daughter at the time], and I will never drive any other vehicle.”
Life saving is one thing, but being life affirming is quite another. Now, clearly, I’m a guy who likes to spend time around cars, but even allowing for this the World of Volvo has to count as one of the most relaxing, enjoyable places I’ve ever visited. Unlike the faceless, rather cold exhibits you get in most car museums, this place feels as warm and welcoming as the EX40’s volcanically heated seats. It’s a place to not merely come and look at the cars, but to stop, sit, stay and be at one with your thoughts.
Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising. World of Volvo’s chief executive, Magnus Wrahme, says the building is designed not to merely showcase cars, but around the concept of “omtanke”, or “care for people.”
There is more than car stuff here, too. There’s an exhibition of a tour boat in far-off Svalbard that uses Volvo electric motors to silently bring tourists around ice-floe-filled bays. There are facial-scanning panels that show you how your face represents joy, anger and surprise. There are mini wind-tunnels that show you how it feels to be a vehicle prototype. And there are even vast ball-pits, from which you can scoop up rubber balls using real-life mini Volvo excavators, from which your correspondent had to be asked politely to leave as there was a queue of kids building up ...
The exhibits change regularly, drawing on the vast repository of historic vehicles which Volvo keeps in a giant series of racks, across town (and which would surely be worth a visit were it ever open to the public. Alas …). I honestly can’t recommend it highly enough.
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