It wasn’t that long ago that Swedish marque Volvo was considered a sideliner in the Malaysian automotive landscape. While its German opposition sold in vast numbers, the little Swede was just that – little. It sold enough cars to keep the showrooms & service centres going with no compromise in quality, and profits were most certainly there, just meagre. If Malaysia didn’t have the advantage of having a fully-fledged Volvo factory in Shah Alam, we’d probably have to deal with 2-3 year delays on new models too.

But things have changed for Volvo. Since its takeover by Chinese automotive giant Geely, who quickly realised it was best to let the Swedes do their thing rather than PRC the crap out of it, the company has been going from strength-to-strength in recent years globally, and even locally. 

It was just the other day that we reported on our social media channels the upcoming opening of a new dealership on the outskirts of Johor Bharu, the 13th such dealership in Malaysia with many more set to come throughout 2019. This is all part of Volvo’s local office’s strategy to focus on the customer experience & dealer network, and already, “internal polls are showing positive results thanks to improvements made in these two key areas.”

We experienced this for ourselves at the opening of the AJ Premium Motors dealership in Batu Pahat, where we saw Volvo’s new showroom design language and brand ethos in full swing. From the intimately-professional conduct of its staff to its Scandinavian-chic design, you could tell that Volvo was serious about its transformation into a brand that could well and truly rival the German stalwarts. And the proof was in the pudding, with an increase in local sales for Volvo rising in excess of 60%.

But there is something else to it, too.

The other day I had the opportunity to sample the 2019 Mercedes-Benz C300 AMG-Line in its facelifted form, with its air suspension & Multibeam LED headlights and the like. It was a nice car no doubt, with its sculpted seats and fancy twin-screen COMAND system, but what really caught my eye was the wood trim. A black, open-pore Ash, it looked stunning on the centre console ‘slide’ and the door panels. But when I looked closer, I noticed something a little odd.

While the centre console and driver’s door panels featured black ash wood with ‘striped’ graining, the front passenger’s door had a more ‘circular’ grain. Of course, anyone will tell you that no tree grows in a mirror grain and that to achieve such a pattern would cost so much in time and effort, but it was the sort of thing that wrankled the experience a bit. It left me thinking if the 64-colour configurable ambient lighting system was made to distract me from what I would consider an oversight.

But what really bothered me throughout my week with the C300 was the recollection of every Volvo Inscription I’d driven in recent years. From the XC60 to the S90 & V90, all the way up to the gargantuan XC90 – they’d all had matching, mirror-aligned wood finishes. On the centre console beneath the 9-inch Sensus touchscreen, it would meet in a beautiful V-formation on the inward-curved panel, and it created an effect of sheer quality and attention to detail. 

Volvo doesn’t scream and shout about this sort of thing. They just do it and let you be amazed.

Motoring journo veteran Chris Wee is also a former Volvo staffer, and he’s recalled multiple times the tagline they used to tout: “Bums in seats sell cars.” I’ve often heard relatives of mine, devoted to the Volvo brand, repeat something similar. ‘Volvo for Life’ was the tagline for many years, and for them, it meant that once you buy into a Volvo you’ll never buy anything else. 

A granduncle of mine bought his first Volvo in 2003, an S80. He proceeded to then buy the facelifted S80, and then the final-generation S80, and I believe that not long from now he’ll take the plunge and buy an S90. Volvo for life, indeed.

But there are greater ramifications to Volvo’s continued rise in Malaysia. For starters, the Malaysians who toil day-in and day-out to build Iron Mark-ed cars in Shah Alam will continue to be trained and re-trained to build better and better cars every day, keeping up with their peers the world over. Soon there will likely be more of them – with the locally-assembled Volvo XC40 compact SUV (which we will be reviewing soon) the first model in the brand’s history to attract a waiting list in Malaysia, we can only imagine that Volvo Car Malaysia is on the hunt for innovations and improvements that’ll improve their production speed & capacity.

But it also means that they will soon be the standard-bearers not only for active safety in modern luxury cars, but also in quality of execution. With more Volvos taking to the roads, visibility of the brand is increasing. With improved visibility comes improved interest, which turns into more walk-in customers in showrooms, who will then put their bums in Swedish seats and experience what it’s like to have a Volvo in the family.

It doesn’t help the competition either that Volvo’s leasing programs are so attractive. 

Soon, it’ll be within reason that people will stop visiting the German showrooms by default, and place Volvo as a brand alongside them as they consider their next luxury car. Plug-in hybrid buyers will be the first to make that change I reckon, with Volvos still the only brand available locally that integrates its hybrid systems so seamlessly that it leaves no practical impact on the packaging of the car. And when they start doing that, I guarantee I will not be the only one going ‘Hey, wasn’t the wood in the Volvo nicer?’

It’s worth keeping this in mind, particularly if you’re from a rival manufacturer, that you also don’t have knurled aluminium finishes for the starter switch, volume dials, and drive-mode selectors. You also don’t have gorgeous yellow Kevlar cones hiding behind laser-cut speaker grilles (like Volvo does with their Bowers & Wilkins systems), or a cacophony of almost-orchestratic beeps & bongs to warn you that you left your lights on, a door ajar, or that you might not have shut the boot properly. 

And at the time of writing, the mainstream rivals also don’t offer half of the advanced driver assistance systems that come on every new Volvo as standard. If Malaysians opened their eyes a bit further and stopped worrying about resale value, the Germans would be slaughtered by now.

But mercifully, us Malaysians are a brand-conscious bunch, and so this will buy a few more years for the competition to buck up and rightfully claim that they’re ‘as good as.’ 

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