Autobayng News Team
If you’ve spent any time in the EV-sphere online, you’ve likely seen the term “EREV” lately. It’s a funny-looking acronym that is short for “extended range electric vehicle.” While shrouded in mystery to the average person, marketing managers and bigwig executives see EREVs as the future of driving.
The recipe is simple. You take a dedicated EV platform and you add in a gas engine that purely acts as a generator to recharge the battery, not to drive the wheels. You get a familiar user experience, way less range anxiety, and hopefully even fewer emissions.
Let’s face it—all-electric driving should be the way forward, but for many, it isn’t. EV prices, issues with range and servicing, and charging woes still occupy a perhaps overstated and overrepresented space of fear in the minds of many consumers. Be that as it may, even China’s automakers are starting to meet buyers where they’re at with more and more EREVs.
Lately, Volvo’s been adamant that its electric-only future hasn’t quite fired on all cylinders, but it remains committed to reducing its environmental impact. One way forward, Volvo says, will be a large EREV SUV built in America. That could align Volvo even more closely with its Chinese parent company, the Geely Group, which is quickly expanding its EREV game in other parts of the world.
There’s already a lot of speculation about what this next-generation Volvo EREV could be, but I’m here to tell you that we kind of already know. Or, at least I do.
Why Go EREV?
As straightforward as the term “extended range electric vehicle” sounds, it can feel quite nebulous. Ask the U.S, government, or a brand manager at a new energy vehicle company, or the average car salesman, and I’ll bet you’ll get three different answers. Sometimes it’s a legal term, controlling what kind of federal incentives a manufacturer would incur or what kind of registration costs an owner would need to pay. Believe me, I found that out the hard way when my old Chevrolet Volt was classified as an “electric vehicle,” and not a “plug-in hybrid” when it came to renewing my registration every year.
My point is, things can be a little murky. We have an explainer here at our site, but for the sake of the discussion and how it pertains to Volvo’s plans, an EREV is effectively a PHEV car on steroids. Or rather, something that starts with an EV platform and adds a gas engine, while a PHEV starts with a gas car platform and adds batteries.
However, PHEV models may only have small electric motors or relatively tiny batteries to move a car around, like the Kia Niro PHEV, which only has about 84 horsepower and can only 33 miles in fully electric mode. EREVs aim to rebalance this, with the car’s primary propulsion and driving range being done on electric power. The batteries, electric motors, and charging ability is much, much more similar to an electric car, and not a gas-powered hybrid. The gas engine is generally only there to maintain a certain level of charge on the car’s main traction battery, often not connected to the wheels in any way.
For the record, it’s not entirely clear that Volvo’s big American-built SUV will be an EREV or a PHEV; we asked the automaker and it isn’t saying yet. But based on the CEO’s statements that it “behaves like an electric car, with very fast acceleration, but it has an onboard charger to extend the range,” we’re going to assume it’s more than just another PHEV. This is also very similar to the language that Zeekr and Lynk & Co use to describe the 9x and 900, respectively.
So, How Does Volvo Get Around This?
Lately, EV penetration in China has hit some roadblocks, especially in the medium to large segments full of pricey EV crossovers and SUVs. Turns out that, unlike Europeans or the Japanese, Chinese buyers love big vehicles as much as we Americans do. And with that comes big-battery problems.
It’s not that Chinese buyers don’t want to electrify. It’s just that pricy customers aren’t necessarily smitten with the full EV experience, especially when it comes to price and the recharge times associated with long travel and driving.
Thus, Geely has created some new vehicles to reach people where they are in their electrification journeys. It has also taken a knife to some of its SEA-platform fully electric cars and altered them with gas engines and smaller batteries for a wider audience.
But regardless of whether they’re an altered EV platform or riding on a ground-up platform meant to handle EV or PHEV models, Geely’s models technically aren’t EREVs, depending on who you ask. Some Geely brands and models, like the new Zeekr 9X, market the car as a “super hybrid” that marries the benefits of all three powertrains—but the key factor is that Geely’s gas engines do a little more than just charge the batteries. Lynk & Co 08 Photo by: Geely
Geely’s system is sort of similar to what you’d find in a modern Honda hybrid. In Honda hybrids, the electric motor does most of the propulsion, while the gas engine works its best to recharge whatever battery power it used while moving.
However, Geely, Chevrolet, Ford, and many others quickly realized this concept isn’t always the most efficient for driving, especially at high speeds. At its core, the car is burning fuel to generate electricity—an inherently energy-losing process. Honda and Geely came up with similar answers, though. The two systems have a clutch to let the gas engine directly turn the wheels as necessary. Geely’s approach takes it a step further by adding a two or three-speed ratio that gives the gas engine a bit more flexibility as to when it can be engaged onto the car’s drive axle (in the front). If the car is all-wheel-drive, its rear wheels are electrically powered.
How Does It Drive?
In short, very smooth. Geely’s setup is found on several cars in the Lynk & Co, Zeekr, Geely and now Smart umbrella. I’ve had experience with two, specifically the Lynk & Co 08 EM-P most recently the Lynk & Co 900.
The 900, in particular, I found very impressive. The 900’s large (for a hybrid, anyway) 60 kWh battery and more than 800 horsepower from its electric motors meant that, unlike a dinky 80 horsepower Kia, this SUV never has a problem moving with authority in engine-off mode. When the engine does come on, it generally only comes to boost any sort of excessive use under hard acceleration. I would wager that slower drivers would never really notice the car isn’t electric. Lynk & Co 08 Photo by: Geely
I’ve also driven the 08 EM-P in engine-on, range-sustaining mode. It’s not quite as swift as full EV mode, but you only notice under a full burst of acceleration, driving like a maniac. For me, this was on a closed track. Once again, I would wager that most daily drivers would not notice, so long as they are sure to charge the vehicle regularly.
What Does This Mean For Volvo?
Geely is Volvo’s parent company; we all know that. But within the past two or three years, Geely has wanted more synergy between its brands. Back during a visit to Geely’s world headquarters in Hangzhou, China in 2024, representatives of the brand planned to simplify its operations with more harmony between its various divisions like Volvo, Polestar, Lynk & Co, Zeekr and others.
The announcement of a future big EREV model is how the brand could do it. During Volvo’s big presentation, Volvo explained that its next big plug-in SUV would be developed with Geely tech.
Volvo XC70
Photo by: Volvo
This tracks with what we’ve already seen. Recently, Geely has been sinking its teeth more into Volvo’s operations; last year, Geely Vice President Ruiping Wang intended to increase parts commonality and lower development costs amongst models along all Geely brands. Once, ownership of Polestar was once more in the orbit of Volvo, but now it’s primarily owned by Gee. The Polestar 4 is on a Geely (Zeekr)-developed platform, and the Polestar 7 is expected to follow suit. The Volvo EX30 shares a lot with the Zeekr X and Lynk & Co Z20.
That Lynk & Co 900 uses an altered version of the Volvo XC90’s platform called SPA Evo, meant to be able to hold the hybrid stuff. In China, there’s a model was recently released a few days ago called the XC70, which uses a hybrid version of the updated CMA platform used on the Polestar 2 and Lynk & Co 08. It’s all a hodgepodge, a melting pot of company synergies.
We still have very little to go on aside from a blurry profile when it comes to more granular details of Volvo’s next crossover. But I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to acknowledge that the moves the brand makes in China will trickle down to American roads.
And if our U.S. market Volvo EREV is anything like what I’ve seen from Lynk & Co, then you’re in for a real treat.
Contact the author: kevin.williams@insideevs.com More Articles About Volvo And Geely
