THE GLOBAL ECONOMY WAS IN DIRE STRAITS in 2009 — and few companies were harder hit than Volvo. The Swedish carmaker faced declining sales thanks to a stale cupboard of model selections and fierce competition from Germany. It also faced flagging morale as rumours began to swirl of a sale by Ford, its corporate parent for a decade. “The company was psychologically depressed and almost bankrupt,” Peter Mertens, Volvo’s Senior Vice President of Research and Development told BBC Autos in an exclusive interview during the launch of the new S90 saloon and V90 estate. “At that point, we needed stability. Volvo was thinking and behaving as if Ford had left us, but we had actually left Ford. Yet, we were acting as if we were still part of a big company. At 360,000 cars annually, we were tiny.”

Enter: China. In May 2010, the Zhejiang Geely Holding Group purchased Volvo from Ford for £1.2b — the largest foreign purchase by a Chinese car company at that point. The deal raised eyebrows among media pundits and consumers alike. How could Geely, a company that had received zero-star crash-test ratings, do right by Sweden’s venerable ‘Drive Safely’ carmaker?

But Geely had a plan. The company allowed Volvo to maintain Swedish management, and its chairman, Li Shufu, spoke to Mertens about generating ideas, not generating revenue, focusing on crafting a long-term vision and establishing Volvo, once and for all, as a world-class prestige brand. It quickly became clear to Volvo executives like Mertens that Geely purchased Volvo for the dormant strengths that Volvo itself had somehow lost in the years prior.

In the six years since, Volvo has evolved — both its cars and its culture. “We changed how we develop ideas, research, technologies, how we approach design and manufacture,” says Mertens, “but it even goes beyond that. Fundamentally, we cannot live by processes. We do not produce and sell processes. We create products and we must be proud of them and build the best cars we possibly can. So, to adhere to our Volvo brand pillars, we took charge of our destiny.”

The company made some brave product decisions. They decided to solely build four-cylinder cars and offer different power levels by turbocharging, supercharging and electric drive. Designers chose to eschew knobs and buttons almost entirely and opt for touchscreen operation of most audio, ventilation, navigation and other secondary controls in all Volvos. And that touch screen is in portrait orientation, not landscape due to heading-prioritised map use. It also splits up into different tiles on-screen, showing different functions and systems.

The first vehicle to really embody this new thinking — in fact, the all-new Volvo created under Geely ownership — was the 2015 XC90, the successor to the company’s 13-year-old mid-size sport-utility vehicle. Stylish inside and out and heaped with innovative safety tech and clever powertrain options, the XC90 was an instant hit with consumers and selected by a panel of motoring writers as the 2016 North American Truck of the Year.

“Perhaps we even overdid the XC90 in some ways,” says Mertens. “Maybe it didn’t need all of the leapfrog technology we put into it, but we wanted it to be a statement vehicle; to show what is possible from a reborn Volvo.”

As well-received as it was, the XC90 SUV is not the siren of Volvo’s rebirth. The S90 saloon and V90 estate are more substantially cut from the Volvo archetype than an SUV.

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