Volvo’s new VEA family of four-cylinder engines starts production

Volvo has announced that its new range of four cylinder engines – Volvo Engine Architecture (VEA) engines – has gone in to production in Sweden.

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Volvo has decided that the future for the ICE engine in Volvos is a maximum of four cylinders – petrol and diesel – and the option of a bit of electrification for some hybrid help.

As a result, Volvo has been planning a new range of four-cylinder engines to power their range in the future – the new Volvo Engine Architecture (VEA) – and has spent the last couple of years readying their design – and their facility in Skövde – to start production. And now it’s underway.

Together with Volvo’s Scalable Product Architecture (SPA) the new VEA engines will be a core part of every new Volvo before too long, and will replace the five and six cylinder engines Volvo currently uses and will provide more power than current six-cylinder engines with economy and emissions better than current four-cylinder engines. A neat trick.

Derek Crabb, Volvo’s VP of Powertrain Engineering, said:

This marks a milestone in Volvo Cars’ history. With our new engine family we are focusing on two additional vital properties – driving pleasure and fuel efficiency.

During the development of VEA, the starting point was our customers and what we wanted to offer them in regard to good fuel economy, low environmental impact and immense driving pleasure at an attractive price. At the same time, however, it’s also about the fact that Volvo Cars gets a sound basis for developing future-generation technologies featuring fuel economy of absolute world class.

The new VEA engines are replacing eight engine architectures across three different platforms, and Volvo will be introducing the new engines between now and 2015, with the first variants being readied to fit in the newly revised Volvo S60, V60, XC60, V70, XC70 and S80 by the end of 2013.

It’ll be very interesting to see just how driveable the new engines are, and if they offer real world improvements in economy and performance.