Volvo Cars ahead of AIMday Materials 2025

What motivated your company to join this university-industry platform? How do you believe this collaboration can contribute to advancements in material innovations at Volvo Cars?

"Volvo Cars has had a strategic partnership with Uppsala University since April 2022, focused on research, education and innovation. Materials is an area of high strategic importance and focus at Volvo Cars because materials underpin so many of the attributes that our customers value in our vehicles and affect our business performance in numerous ways. This is especially the case with the challenges related to the materials associated with the shift to electric vehicles.

Materials is a team sport, and so it was a natural step to deepen our involvement and join the Ångström Materials Academy, ÅMA. Bringing together academia, industry and other actors with the aim of enabling research and development projects and new innovations, this platform allows us to explore new possibilities, with a focus on materials science. Together we should be able to move faster and have a bigger impact, both inside and outside the automotive sector, across Sweden and beyond."

How does this platform align with or support your company’s research and development efforts, particularly in the area of material research?

"It's still early days and hard to be specific at this point in time, but we're optimistic and the signs are positive. We've already identified a range of topics that are of interest to the other industrial partners and correspondingly to the academic partners. Those topics span a broad range of technology readiness levels and equally, align quite well with the funding calls emerging in Sweden and the EU. We are already looking forward to participating in the AIMday in 2025."

Given your company’s focus on sustainability, especially in relation to sustainable materials, how can participating in this platform supported those efforts? Are there specific projects or outcomes that you want to see in the future?

"Volvo Cars aims to be a pioneer in protecting people and the planet by working towards net zero, embracing the circular economy and improving people’s lives. We have defined specific ambitions when it comes to our use of more sustainable materials. Additionally, we aim to be a good steward of the materials used in our vehicles, passing them on to the next application with minimal degradation. To achieve this, we are heavily reliant on our supply chain partners to produce, recover and recirculate materials. We are not a material producer ourselves, but by working together we believe that we can find solutions that bring value to all stakeholders.

It's very clear that we need to accelerate the transition to more sustainable and sustainably produced materials, increasing access and availability. In some cases, there are technical challenges to solve, in others it's more about scaling up and improving efficiency. We hope to explore some of those challenges within the ÅMA platform."