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Volvo vows to charge subscriptions only for major updates

Volvo Cars Chief Operating Officer Bjorn Annwall   BMW veered into a public-relations mess this year when it started charging car owners monthly subscription fees to warm their behinds. Volvo Car won’t be making similar moves. “If you are to charge for software updates, it must be a step change in consumer benefit,” VolvoÂ’s Chief Operating Officer Bjorn Annwall said in an interview this month. “We will not ask people who have bought a car for 1 million kronor ($96,500) to pay another 10 kronor to get extra heat in the seat.” While BMW will no doubt have other manufacturers follow in its footsteps — Mercedes-Benz recently started asking buyers of its EQ electric vehicles to fork over $1,200 a year to unlock quicker acceleration, for example — the auto world has started to second-guess just how much money there is to be made from the rise of software within their hardware-intensive business. In a 91-page deep dive into the topic last month, analysts at UBS pegged the total addressable market at $700 billion by 2030. ThatÂ’s no pittance, but pales in comparison to the $2 trillion opportunity they anticipated previously. Annwall sees Volvo generating little additional revenue from software until mid-decade. Only if major upgrades become available — a self-driving mode, for example — would Volvo charge extra. “You donÂ’t have to hold the steering wheel — now thatÂ’s a step change in user benefit.” Annwall was speaking at the opening of VolvoÂ’s new tech hub in Stockholm, where the manufacturer builds software for selling and marketing cars online. The company, which last month unveiled a battery-powered sport utility vehicle to succeed its gasoline-era flagship, intends to cease making combustion cars by the end of the decade. ItÂ’s going to be an uphill push: EVs made up just under a fifth of the companyÂ’s shipments last month. Bloomberg spoke with Annwall about VolvoÂ’s tech efforts, the software issues that have plagued some of its competitors and the ongoing supply-chain issues holding back the industry. Here are highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity: Large automakers including Volkswagen have had problems with their car software. Have you experienced similar obstacles? I wonÂ’t hide the fact that we have had some problems with our software in the car as well. But weÂ’ve been good at correcting them fairly quickly.

Junkyard Gem: 1984 Volvo 242 DL

Volvo had tremendous success with the iconic 200 Series cars, selling them in North America from the 1975 model year all the way through 1993 (and if you count the Volvo 140, which was the same car from the A pillars rearward, the 240's history goes back to the middle 1960s). Nearly everybody who bought 240s on our continent did so in order to be safe and/or practical, which meant that the two-door version never sold anywhere near as well as its four-door and wagon brethren. Here's one of those rare 240 coupes (technically speaking, a two-door sedan), found in a San Jose car graveyard last winter. If you're going to be a stickler about the designation of this car as a two-door sedan and not as a coupe, you'll also want to call it by the name Volvo used when it was in the showroom: the 1984 Volvo DL. However, everybody in the Volvo world now prefers the original naming system that Volvo used for the 200s back home in Sweden, where you had 2 followed by a numeral indicating the number of engine cylinders and a numeral indicating the number of doors, with the trim-level code after that. So, what we have for today's Junkyard Gem is a Volvo 242 DL, i.e., the cheapest new 240 Americans could buy in 1984. You could get a turbocharged engine from the factory in the 1984 242, but this car has the ordinary naturally-aspirated 2.3-liter straight-four, rated at 111 horsepower. It also has the four-speed manual transmission with overdrive controlled by the button in the middle of the shift knob. Nearly 230,000 miles on the clock, which is decent for any 1980s car but not spectacular by Volvo 240 standards. Many Volvo enthusiasts prefer the smooth lines of the coupe to the stodgier sedans and wagons, and this one shows signs of ownership by someone who wasn't just about listening to NPR while driving safely to the natural-foods store. Sure enough, it has aftermarket springs and a non-factory rear sway bar. I wish I'd found these parts back in 2007, when I was helping to build a V8-swapped Volvo 244 road racer. The presence of the keys in a junkyard car, however, usually indicates that it was voluntarily let go by its final owner. Perhaps it was a dealership trade-in that proved to be impossible to sell due to a combination of three pedals, high miles, and lack of truck-shaped body. The interior looks like it might have been tolerable before it reached this place.

Translogic 189: 2015 LA Auto Show

The LA Auto Show has become known for its green cars and concepts, and 2015 was no exception. Translogic host Jonathon Buckley gets all the details on BMW's 330e plug-in hybrid straight from BMW President of North America Ludwig Willisch. Then we get up-to-date on Honda's latest FCX Clarity hydrogen fuel cell car. We round out our tour with a stop at the Elio Motors booth for a look at their updated, three-wheel P5 concept and a chat with CEO Paul Elio. But first, we jump in a time machine at the Volvo booth to discuss Concept 26, an interpretation of how car interiors might evolve in the era of self-driving cars. "The reason why we talked about it as a time machine [is] because, really, Concept 26 is giving you back something that is so precious," explained Volvo senior director of design Tisha Johnson. "We're letting you delegate driving to the car, so that you can then have that time to yourself." Click here to learn more about our host, Jonathon Buckley.