With most of the building shells completed, Volvo Cars has
started moving equipment into place at its Berkeley County manufacturing campus
ahead of a planned late-year hiring spree and the first newly redesigned S60
sedan rolling off the assembly line before the end of 2018.
The $500 million, 2.3 million-square-foot manufacturing site
off Interstate 26 near Ridgeville is the Swedish automaker's attempt to reclaim
a U.S. market it had all but abandoned a decade ago under previous owner Ford
Motor Co.
With China's Geely Automobile Holdings at the helm since
2010, Volvo has regained much of the market share it lost. Its 82,724 sales
total last year was the best since 2007.
"The United States used to be our largest market,"
Katarina Fjording, the Volvo vice president in charge of building the company's
only North American manufacturing site, said Monday during a tour of the
facility. "We have clawed back pretty good."
Fjording said the company wants the U.S. to eventually
become one of its top two markets, along with China. Globally, Volvo
sold 129,148 cars during the first three months of this year — 7.1
percent better than the previous year as the company works toward its goal of
800,000 sales by 2020.
Volvo's South Carolina facility — part of the Camp Hall
Industrial Campus — currently has a staff of about 150 people, many of
them working out of temporary office space in Summerville. Between 700 and 800
construction workers are at the manufacturing site. This fall, Volvo expects to
hire most of the 2,000 or so workers who will start building cars over the next
few months, with production initially split between two shifts.
Volvo will begin testing its machinery in August and the
first automobile body will make a test run through the body shop, paint shop
and final assembly lines by the end of this year. New office space and a test
track are still under construction.
About 40 percent of the value of all vehicle parts will come
from North American suppliers, with a large number of those made in the U.S.
coming from South Carolina. For example, Gestamp's plant in Union County will
provide body sides and doors while Lear Corp. in Duncan will make the seats.
Many of the South Carolina suppliers also build parts for BMW's manufacturing
site near Greer and the Mercedes-Benz Vans plant under construction in North
Charleston.
"This investment shows Volvo’s commitment to build cars
where we sell them and source where we build," Lex Kerssemakers, president
and CEO of Volvo Car USA, said of the new plant in a written statement.
While the South Carolina factory initially will
produce about 60,000 cars per year — about 60 percent of them exported through
the Port of Charleston to overseas markets — there is plenty of room for
expansion. The paint shop, for example, could handle 30 cars per hour if
necessary. And at full capacity, the plant can build 120,000 cars per year.
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A rail line being built by Palmetto Railways, a division of
the S.C. Commerce Department, will be completed by 2019 to move cars from the
production facility to distribution points for North American sales.
"The first months of production will be to supply the
U.S. market — to saturate that a bit before we start exporting," Fjording
said.
Volvo has said a second car will be made at the Camp Hall
site, but it hasn't specified which model will be produced. An announcement is
expected later this year, but a second vehicle won't start production until
2021.
The newly redesigned V60 sports wagon will share 50 percent
of the same components as the S60, but Fjording said that doesn't necessarily
mean the two cars will share a production line. She said it makes more sense to
build the cars that are most popular in the market served by the facility,
which would be a sport-utility vehicle for U.S. buyers.
The local plant would be capable of producing any vehicle
made on Volvo's new automobile platform that debuted with the all-new XC90 SUV.
The Berkeley County site also could build hybrids and autonomous versions of
any vehicle produced there as the technology becomes available.
In addition to the Berkeley County site, Volvo has
production facilities in Sweden, China and Belgium.
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