Media Launch for XC60 – Jan. 19-30

We’re starting today near San Francisco, Sausalito area, to show U.S. media our XC60.  We have four groups of about 30 journalists in each group, meeting with us to go over details about our newest Crossover. This starts with presentations by out lead safety guy Thomas Broberg and Global Project leader Lars Blenwal, both from Volvo Car Corporation in Sweden, along with U.S. project manager Mike Cottone and Volvo Monitoring and Concept Center (in California) Doug Frasher and our VP Marketing and Product John Maloney. Of course we have our colleagues from VCC in technical support to handle vehicle logistics and support staff from U.S. to keep us all on schedule.  James Hope, in our PR group started working on this over a year ago. Huge undertaking. He’s much more organized than I, so we’re rather certain this will work perfectly.

Our day starts bright and early with a 6 a.m. wake up and 7 a.m. testing of City Safety system, then off to about 250 miles of driving. We head North out of Sausalito, along the coast, then back inland via Healdsburg and head South to our base. This kind of event gives media an opportunity to meet with our design/engineering/business team, basically to pick their brains about what we are doing with our XC60. In our daily business, we rarely have all those involved with a project, like XC60, at one place for one time. Thomas is working on future safety systems, Lars is starting to think about his next project, John is working on advertising/marketing magic. While our focus is XC60, media always manage to ask about our future and where we are going, what we’re building, what’s the next car.

If you have any questions about the XC60, send them over and I’ll corner those guys for you.

Here’s some photos of what happened on our first day:

Tags: City Safety, San Francisco, test drive, Volvo, XC60, XC90