Station wagons are an endangered species. That’s true even at Volvo, the most wagon-friendly of traditional manufacturers. The Swedish brand killed off the V60 Polestar Engineered plug-in hybrid due to poor sales, leaving the V60 Cross Country and V90 Cross Country as the only wagons in the lineup. And it sounds like those cars don’t have much of a future as Volvo electrifies for the next generation.
Volvo CEO Jim Rowan spoke to the British website Autocar. He presented a vision of an eight or even seven-vehicle global lineup that doesn’t leave a lot of room for wagons.
Volvo Will Trim Down Its Lineup As It Goes Electric
Rowan described Volvo to Autocar as a “small company with limited resources.” And he suggested that the brand may look to differentiate core models — with variants like the EX30 Cross Country — rather than building niche vehicles.
“Rather than bring a V90, for example, are we better to position that car [the XC60] in a slightly different way? We have the Black Edition, we have the Cross Country edition. So we then now have different editions of the same base car,” Rowan told Autocar. “It’s much, much cheaper and much more cost-effective for us to drive more volume through that same platform and that same form factor.”
Volvo just released the ES90. The brand is reportedly working on an EX60 to slot below the EX90. Add in the EX30 and EX40 crossovers, the EC40 (formerly the C40 Recharge), and the Chinese-only EM90 minivan and there isn’t much room for an additional wagon in an eight-car lineup.
Wagons Look Primed For The Chopping Block In America
Volvo is an SUV brand now for most part. While most car enthusiasts have a soft spot for the boxy Volvo wagon of yore, the sales figures won’t justify keeping Volvo’s wagons in the American lineup much longer. And it’s hard to see the business case for the next generation.
The Cross Country variants were the better-selling wagon models. But Volvo sold just 223 V60 CC and V90 CC wagons combined in America in January 2025. So, wagons made up 2.5-percent of Volvo’s overall sales for the month. The XC60 alone outsold the Volvo wagon lineup nearly 14 times over.
TopSpeed’s Take
We’re probably looking at a wagon-free Volvo lineup in the near future. That eventuality may come as soon as next year, given how sales are going. But don’t despair too much. “SUV” has become a marketing term that encompasses a wide range of vehicles. Electric SUVs become sleeker by getting longer and lower to the ground. The result is often designs like the Kia EV6 that pose as SUVs but are very wagon-like.
We may get a Volvo “SUV” down the road that looks and functions a lot like a wagon — even if Volvo would never put a V in its name.
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