The future of luxury materials is natural, sustainable and responsible

The C40 Recharge is an important car in terms of our electric and commercial future, as you could read earlier this year. But there’s another area in which our new pure electric crossover represents our future: it’s the first Volvo to be fully leather-free inside. As such, the C40 is a hallmark of our commitment that going forward, every fully electric Volvo will be free of leather.

While the raw hides supplied to Volvo Cars today are responsibly sourced as by-products from the beef industry, we want to support animal welfare by contributing to a reduced demand of leather.

Our move towards leather-free interiors is also driven by a concern about the negative environmental impacts of cattle farming, including greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation.

In addition to going leather-free, we also aim to continuously reduce the use of certain materials containing animal products inside our cars – think of certain plastics, rubbers, lubricants and adhesives, which often contain residual products from livestock.

“Finding products and materials that support animal welfare will be challenging, but that is no reason to avoid this important issue,” said Stuart Templar, one of our sustainability experts. “This is a journey worth taking. Having a truly progressive and sustainable mindset means that we need to ask ourselves difficult questions and actively try and find the answers.”

Of course we’ll continue to provide our customers with classy interiors. So instead of leather, we’re actively looking for high-quality and sustainable sources for many materials. In our new electric cars, Volvo drivers will be offered high-quality interior options based on bio-attributed and recycled materials, as well as different types of premium textiles and wool blends with responsibly sourced wool.

The thing is that the definition of premium and luxury is changing. The design world as a whole is moving towards something called Conscious Design, whereby sustainability and responsible sourcing plays an ever-increasing role in creating materials and products. Customer research also shows that for them, sustainability plays a growing role when selecting a brand’s products.

As a new trend report from Volvo Cars and The Future Laboratory shows, designers around the world are actively sourcing high-quality, sustainable and responsibly-sourced materials as they strive to create the luxury products of the future. That fits well with our focus on the circular economy and creating more sustainable products.

A good example is a new, Volvo-created interior material called Nordico that will make its debut in our next generation of fully electric cars. It consists of textiles made from recycled material such as PET bottles, bio-attributed material from sustainable forests in Sweden and Finland, and corks recycled from the wine industry. In other words: very sustainable and yet of the highest quality.

By 2025, we aim for 25 per cent of the material in new Volvo cars to consist of recycled and bio-based content, as part of our ambition to be a fully circular business by 2040. We also aim for all our immediate suppliers, including material suppliers, to use 100 per cent renewable energy by 2025.

So, as with everything, the development of future materials remains a work in progress. But we can rest assured that we’re at the forefront of this development and living up to our ambition of being a company that takes sustainability as seriously as safety.