The head of global design for Volvo Cars says the Swedish automaker isn’t about to blindly follow the likes of BMW and Mercedes-Benz down the coupé-SUV path, warning that doing so could “damage” the brand.
Speaking to GoAuto, Robin Page, senior vice-president for design at Volvo Cars, said that the brand had to be “careful” when thinking about conceiving swoopy-roofed SUVs to compete with models such as the BMW X4 and X6, and the Mercedes-Benz GLC and GLE coupés.
“If you look at how BMW and Mercedes do it, it’s almost an easy cash-in to say, ‘Okay, you’ve got your SUV now, let’s do a low roof and get more volume out of that’,” Page said, according to the Australian publication.
“You’ve got to kind of be careful not to do too much of that, otherwise you start to damage your brand, I think,” he added.
Still, Page refused to rule out the possibility of Volvo eventually entering the segment.
“We’ve got the potential to do it; we’re still going through discussions and studies to see what we’ll do,” he admitted, before suggesting coupé-style SUVs were far down the brand’s list of priorities seeing as “they’re not the bread-and-butter cars”.