Volvo Cars has taken a minority stake in Carwow, the European online car retailer, a Financial Times report said Tuesday (April 26).
The Swedish brand is looking at selling half its cars online by 2025, and its Carwow stake will boost Volvo’s digital sales and appeal on social media. Volvo has currently around 1 in 10 of its new models being sold purely online.
The report notes that Magnus Fredin, who leads Volvo’s online business, said this will help Volvo “learn and accelerate our online transition.”
“It is important to stick out in the world today,” Fredin said. “We need to adapt the content of what the customers are looking for.”
Carwow, based in London, is the biggest platform for new car sales in the U.K., Germany and Spain. The company also has a big YouTube following.
FT wrote that Volvo’s other goal is to emulate the success Carwow has had with video. Its YouTube channel gets 70 million views per month with postings on car reviews, drag races and the like.
The report says the investment from Volvo’s tech fund is in the “tens of millions” of pounds.
Carwow was rolled out in 2009, at that time an aggregator of reviews. Since then it has morphed into a sales platform, with a marketplace and the videos.
See also: New Volvo CEO: We Need to Better Control Our Software
PYMNTS wrote that Volvo’s new CEO, Jim Rowan, said the company will have to take more control of the software it develops and deploys for vehicles.
He said increasing the computing power of cars will reshape the industry in a bigger way than even the switch from combustion to electric.
He said because of that, Volvo would have to be “a lot more intelligent about the decisions we make around making versus buying software, and we’re going to need to understand software at a much more vestral level than before.”
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