Volvo has built its last-ever diesel car
Volvo has been twinning cars with trusty oil burners since 1979 - well, not anymore
Hands up who has owned a diesel Volvo? A fair few of you, right. Because at one point in time (i.e. about 30 seconds ago on the evolutionary scale) a diesel engine and the practicality and pragmatism of a Volvo went together like melted cheese and toast. You had people and things to move on a regular basis; doing it with the minimum amount of fuss and the maximum amount of efficiency spoke to the Volvo way. And, in more than a few cases, it resulted in a pretty good car.
Well, despite a slowdown in everyone’s enthusiasm about the alternative ways of powering a family-sized car (and several premium manufacturers duly hitting the brakes on their transition to battery-electric vehicles), Volvo yesterday announced that it was entirely done with the oil burners. ‘We’ve built our last diesel car’ it proclaimed, with the last V60 produced back in February, and the final XC90 completed ‘just the other day’.
To its credit, Volvo makes no bones about the importance of the black pump to its recent history. ‘For a long time, our diesel engines were synonymous with reliability and efficiency, and they meant a great deal to us for many decades.’ As recently as 2019, the majority of the cars it sold in Europe were diesel-powered; the culmination of a 40-year success story that saw the introduction of the Volvo 244 GL D6 (the world’s first six-cylinder oil burner in a passenger car, according to its maker) back in 1979.
PH is fairly sure this was a VW engine; in fact, it wasn’t till 2001 (and just in time for diesel to really take off) that Volvo finally produced its own motor - specifically the five-cylinder 2.4-litre D5 that was introduced in the new V70, but went on to become virtually ubiquitous across the Volvo lineup. It was followed in 2008 by the Drive-E range based on a super-frugal 1.6-litre four-pot that could potentially do 800 miles to a tank if you drove like Miss Daisy was paying the bills and had a permanent tailwind.
Let’s not forget, either, that Volvo was so keen on the efficiency that could be squeezed from a diesel engine that when it first came to the job of buying a plug-in hybrid, it decided to twin an electric motor with the venerable D5 to produced the world’s first diesel-electric production car. Obviously today that would appear to make about as much sense as putting the Blue Peter garden on a North Sea oil rig - but back in 2012 it seemed like a no-brainer; not least because Volvo was still sufficiently preoccupied with diesel to launch an entirely new 2.0-litre motor the following year.
That engine (part of the extensive Volvo Engine Architecture family), through various derivatives and updates, saw Volvo through to 2024 and - presumably in range-topping 235hp format - was the unit that took its final bow under the XC90’s hood. For Volvo’s part, its sign-off is a ‘big step towards our ambitions of becoming a fully electric car maker, as well as achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040.’ For the rest of us, it has well earned another solemn tip of the PH cap. RIP, D-badge.
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