Mother’s Day proved bittersweet for Nicole Melillo Shaw, relaxing with her family and sipping a glass of her favourite wine.
For the first time, Volvo had sold more than 11,000 cars in a month in the UK — a milestone for Melillo Shaw, the carmaker’s British head. But it was one that was quickly overshadowed by an email announcing the shock exit of group chief executive Jim Rowan.
“I was halfway through a glass of rosé,” she says. “Did it come as a surprise? Yes, because on Sunday afternoon, enjoying Mother’s Day, I wasn’t thinking about anything like that.”
Volvo has been selling cars in the UK since 1958. So news that it is breaking records in what is now its third-biggest market will come as a rare glimmer of light for an industry among the most exposed to the doom and gloom of trade wars and deglobalisation.
The departure of Rowan, the former chief executive of Dyson, shocked some, not least because it came hot on the heels of the carmaker reporting record profits for last year. Others, however, cited an embarrassing U-turn on going all-electric by the end of the decade, and plunging electric vehicle (EV) sales in the US, as potential reasons for Volvo letting the Scottish executive go.
But sitting in Volvo’s UK headquarters on the outskirts of Maidenhead, Berkshire, Melillo Shaw is determined to look on the bright side.
Not only were total UK sales of 11,898 in March the best for any month in Volvo’s history, the company notched up a record quarter, with more than 18,000 vehicles delivered in the first three months of the year. This means Volvo had 3.3 per cent of the country’s new car market last month, more than Renault and not far behind Land Rover. The UK has leapfrogged Germany to be Volvo’s biggest market after China and the US. And yes, that means Volvo sells considerably more cars in the UK than it does in its native Sweden.
“It’s a real statement of our progression,” Melillo Shaw says. “Our aspiration was to have a five-digit number. But to get to more than 11,500 deliveries is just phenomenal.”
So what is it about Volvo that we cannot get enough of? Is it simply that Brits just like boring cars? This draws a grin. “The reason I smile is because I know why you’re saying that. And I know where you’re coming from when you say it.”
The association of being “boring” is a legacy of Volvo’s reputation for producing boxy, functional cars with pioneering safety features — something that has been in its DNA ever since it created the three-point seatbelt in 1959.
But after the turn of the millennium, and then its purchase by China’s Geely in 2010, square edges were softened as Volvo sought to reposition itself in the premium market by offering some of the luxuries typically found in German marques such as BMW and Mercedes.
Melillo Shaw says: “Rather than being boring and [a case of] giving up on life, it’s now humble and understated. [Consumers] actually quite like that; they don’t want to be shouty — ‘Look what I’ve got.’ Brits are quite like that by nature, aren’t they?”
And for all the talk of an EV U-turn, Professor David Bailey of Birmingham Business School talks up how the carmaker has hedged its bets on the green agenda and developed a range of power systems. “It has allowed Volvo to be flexible as the market goes up and down in relation to petrol, hybrid and full-electric vehicles,” he said.
Andy Palmer, the former chief executive of Aston Martin, reckons that all-electric or not, Volvo’s range of EVs could also have benefited from a more recent trend. Tesla sales have fallen to their lowest level in nearly three years as a consumer backlash grows over the role of its chief executive, Elon Musk, in the Trump administration. Tesla’s UK sales did grow in March to 7,164 vehicles, a 2.4 per cent rise compared with a year ago. Volvo’s sales, by contrast, surged 58 per cent.
Palmer says: “In a moment where Tesla is suffering quite a lot, it might be the winner out of that is Volvo.”
Another factor behind Volvo’s success in the UK is how it gets its cars to market, says Melillo Shaw. Two years ago, the company decided to shake up its dealership network in the UK by swapping a more traditional franchise model for an agency alternative.
Under franchising, dealers buy new vehicles and sell them to customers for a profit. Agents, by contrast, do not own the cars; they act as intermediaries facilitating a sale between the end customer and the manufacturer.
Melillo Shaw labels the direct-to-consumer switch as one of the biggest changes in Volvo’s history. She insists that dealers are much happier with not taking cars “onto their balance sheets” — even if they pocket more modest fees as a result.
Palmer is wary, though. “Car companies managing their own dealer groups are historically fraught with issues,” he says. “While the franchising model has many weaknesses from a [carmaker’s] point of view, because you lose about 15-17 per cent of your profit margin, when they find out how difficult [the agency model] is, it costs more than that.”
Nevertheless, Melillo Shaw insists that Volvo is reaping the benefits of being “much closer to the consumer” with targeted advertising. And it is an initiative that she is well placed to oversee after earning her stripes in the cut-throat world of fast-moving consumer goods.
Her first job out of university was with the FTSE 100 medical equipment giant Smith & Nephew. But it was her move five years later to Reckitt Benckiser — where she worked on brands including Finish dishwasher tablets, Gaviscon, Strepsils and Lemsip — that left a mark.
“You don’t go to Reckitt if you’re not quite tough — it’s not for the faint-hearted,” she says. “It’s a really strong culture. It used to be like being on The Apprentice every Monday: they wanted your ideas, they wanted you to be accountable.”
After five years, she moved to the pharmaceuticals giant GSK, managing the Sensodyne toothpaste account before moving onto the Zovirax cold sore treatment and then Lamisil for athlete’s foot. “I know — glamour, glamour, glamour,” Melillo Shaw jokes.
She switched to Volvo Cars UK in March 2020, a week before the first Covid lockdown, and took over as managing director in November 2023. In Britain, Volvo is all about sales. It has no manufacturing presence; cars are imported from Belgium, Sweden, China and the US. And from a sales perspective, understanding consumers’ wants and needs is ever more intertwined with their perception of zero-emission vehicles.
The initial surge of interest in EVs has petered out and while sales are still growing, “range anxiety” — the fear that an EV will run out of battery power — persists. Linked to this is the lack of charging points. Melillo Shaw says this is primarily to blame for the mentality of many buyers who think they will own “one more [petrol] car before they go fully electric”.
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All these factors pushed Volvo to rip up its all-electric plans last September. Having previously pledged to manufacture only electric vehicles from 2030, the company is now targeting 90-100 per cent of its global sales to be either fully electric or plug-in hybrid. The remaining 10 per cent could be what it calls “mild hybrids”, where a standard combustion engine is assisted by an electric battery to improve fuel efficiency.
“As a business, we are ready to go 100 per cent fully electric. The reason we adjusted those numbers was purely because of consumer uptake and appetite,” says Melillo Shaw.
Labour last week confirmed plans to outlaw sales of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030, bringing forward the ban from 2035 (which, somewhat confusingly, was pushed back from 2030 to 2035 by Rishi Sunak in September 2023).
“It didn’t change what we were aiming to do. Rather it just confirmed that we were heading in the right direction,” she says.
A far more pressing dynamic with consumer appetite for cars of any type is the impact of tariffs on prices. The Trump administration’s decision to impose a 25 per cent tariff on US imports of cars from abroad has big implications for Volvo globally.
Hakan Samuelsson, appointed as Rowan’s successor last week, was quick to say on Thursday that the carmaker would increase manufacturing at its works in Charleston, South Carolina, to avoid import taxes hitting its American operation. Volvo sold 125,000 cars in the US last year — more than double the 66,000 it sold in the UK in 2024.
For now, Melillo Shaw’s focus is on continuing Volvo’s sales momentum in the UK during the rest of 2025. And running one of the country’s favourite car brands comes with plenty of challenges, one of them being that it is a notoriously male sector.
Not that this fazes Melillo Shaw. Born in Middlesex, she grew up in Lincolnshire — which at the time was somewhat bereft of cultural diversity. “Coming from a mixed [race] background, coming from Scunthorpe, there was only one person of mixed race in my school — and that was me. Growing up, I did stand out.”
She adds “I’ve had a few people go, ‘You don’t look like a normal automotive MD,’ ” — and there is a glint in her eye. “[But then] I’ve never really been too bothered about fitting in.”
