Volvo Has Stopped Selling Estates And Saloons In The UK

The older of us, who were raised on boxy old Volvo estates and saloons, hold them in a special place in our hearts. So today is a sad day, because Volvo has discontinued everything but SUVs in the UK.

Gone is the S60 saloon, the V60 estate and the larger V90 estate. The big S90 execution saloon was ditched earlier this year. While this is a move that we’ll see from plenty of other automakers in the near future, it hits particularly hard, as Volvo was for years known as The Brand What Makes Family Estate Cars (our paraphrasing). It even raced an 850 T5 estate in the British Touring Car Championship.

The decision brings to an end a decades-long history of tremendous Volvo load luggers and executive cars, but the sad reality is that not enough people were buying them to justify keeping them on sale. Volvo sales figures for the first half of 2023 showed that the XC60 SUV alone outsold all the saloons and estates combined, by nearly 70%.

Volvo will at least be continuing to supply saloons and estates to the emergency services, so you can still be in fear of a Police V60 doing you for speeding on the motorway.

The future, Volvo says, is electric SUVs, at least in the UK and at least for now. “We continue to rapidly transform our product offer, which means not only moving towards full electrification, but also shifting to new platforms and technologies across all our cars,” the company said in a statement. “We will naturally need to evolve and consolidate our line-up as we prioritise fully electric cars and make this technological transition.

"Demand for our existing SUV line-up continues to grow, while interest in our forthcoming fully electric EX30 and EX90 models is strong. Meanwhile, appetite for our saloon and estate models has fallen to very low levels in the UK, which has led to our decision to remove these models from sale in the UK.”