Volvo PCP Performance Division planned on the back of rising sales

Volvo are planning a performance division – PCP (Performance Concept Prototype) – to sell performance Volvos sorted by Swedish tuners Polestar.

You’re not a serious player in the desirable saloon car stakes unless you have a performance division.

BMW has the M Division and Mercedes has AMG; even VW has swapped out its Volkswagen Individual in to a division just to fettle ‘R’ cars and sell associated paraphernalia – Volkswagen R GmbH. And now it seems it’s the turn of Volvo.

Volvo has been cosying up to Swedish performance company Polestar of late. So much so that all Volvo’s cars at last week’s MMS at Goodwood (as we found out to our cost) had been fettled by Polestar with some added oomph.

So we shouldn’t be surprised at reports that Volvo are on the verge of launching a performance division of their own which they intend naming Volvo PCP (you can make your own jokes). Whether that means just a closer relationship with Polestar or Volvo gobbling up Polestar wholesale we don’t yet know.

WhatCar are reporting that the first PCP (Performance Concept Prototype) Volvo will be a Volvo C30 PCP with four wheel drive and 400bhp with a 0-60mph of under 5 seconds. It will come as a limited edition run of 500 cars and cost around £50k. You can probably work out it’s aimed straight at the M3.

There’s no confirmation of this from Volvo, but since Ford sold Volvo to Geely, Volvo has been very much on the up (there’s a theme here – look at Jaguar under Tata).

Analysts are predicting that Volvo will sell 425,000 cars this year, partly on the back of increasing sales in China (Geely hope to be selling 200k a year there by 2015) but also on the back of good product. That’s not a million miles off Volvo’s best ever year (pre economic downturn) when they shifted 458k cars in 2007.

Geely’s ambitions for Volvo are not small – they are aiming for 800k a year by 2020 – and one very good way to justify a premium price (perhaps our only real complaint about many of Volvo’s cars) is to have a high-performance halo casting a desirable glow down the range.

It all makes sense.