Volvo launches new electrical vehicle tech centre in Poland

Volvo is opening a new know-how hub in Poland, its fourth in the world and 2nd outdoors Sweden. The program advancement centre in Kraków, which will hire up to 600 people, will be portion of the car manufacturer’s go to all-electric output.

“[It will] enjoy a essential function in our strategic ambitions to be a absolutely electric model by 2030 and a leader in new technological know-how, not least by in-household software package advancement,” says the firm. “The tech hub will carry total obligation for producing comprehensive and crucial options on our new totally electric powered cars.”

Volvo states Kraków was chosen for the reason that “the city is an rising tech centre, with a wide network of tech firms in the region…[and] a huge telecom sector”. The agency presently has know-how centres in Stockholm and Lund in Sweden as perfectly as one in Bangalore in India.

The Kraków hub will be operational by the stop of this yr, in the beginning employing 120 employees, mounting to 500-600 by 2025. Volvo has currently introduced the choosing procedure by submitting occupation ads for embedded software program engineers, procedure architects and testers.

“The engineers will get the job done on remedies associated to basic safety, but also with essential help for on-board pcs,” claims Jim Rowan, CEO of Volvo Cars and trucks, quoted by news services Interia.

Although Poland has one of the EU’s cheapest proportions of electric autos – with only 3.6% of recently registered vehicles being electrical or hybrid – the place is becoming a important production hub.

In 2020, it became the EU’s biggest exporter of electric powered buses, with Solaris – a Spanish-owned Polish producer – Europe’s largest producer of this sort of buses.

The following yr it was declared that Poland will host the first facility in the European Union and a single of the 1st in the world for processing used automobile batteries and other kinds of waste from electric vehicles.

In July previous year, SK Nexilis, a South Korean company of copper foil employed in electric-automobile batteries, inaugurated the building of a 3 billion zloty (€627 million) factory in the southeastern Polish city of Stalowa Wola.

In December very last year, a further important motor vehicle producer Mercedes announced €1 billion expenditure to create a manufacturing facility in Poland to completely make electrical vans.

Principal picture credit rating: 1 Tonne Existence/Flickr (beneath CC BY-NC-ND 2.)

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She formerly worked for Reuters.