Daily rental has been at a consistent level over the past two to three years and it is a level which Volvo is “comfortable with” (although the 2,400 registered in 2011 was a 75% year-on-year rise).

“In absolute terms, daily rental won’t grow for us,” Cooper says. “As a percentage it will decline as our volumes grow.”

Although Motability is still seen as a “valuable sales channel”, and Cooper wants to maintain a presence, Volvo’s Motability sales will continue declining (last year they fell by 17%).

This is partly due to Motability recently introducing a maximum customer payment and maximum value which have “taken a lot of the options away from Volvo to supply cars on that scheme”.

Volvo’s main focus is on ‘true fleet’ which is where the brand has seen progressive growth over the past three years, according to Cooper.

This year has also got off to a good start – true fleet registrations are up 20% year-on-year.

The team of six business development managers provided by Magma, which targets SMEs with 25 to 100 vehicles, had its best ever month of order take in February.

Cooper believes that even if the economy is “bumpy” over the next 10 years, Volvo has the products to compensate.

Safety remains at the heart of its development strategy. The V40 has the world’s first pedestrian airbag as standard (go to www.fleetnews.co.uk/fntv/ to see it in action).

City Safety – Volvo’s Autonomous Emergency Braking system, which now works at speeds of up to 31mph – is also standard.

An optional safety feature is a lane keeping aid with haptic auto steering.

This detects if a driver is moving out of a lane and applies slight pressure to the steering wheel.

Cooper also believes Volvo’s environmental credentials will attract fleet operators to the brand and another key launch this year will be the 49g/km V60 diesel plug-in hybrid.

Resourced for growth

New product alone won’t help Volvo to achieve its growth plans, according to Cooper.

The products have to be supported by investment in resource and training.

“We were resourced for recession and now we need to be resourced for growth,” Cooper says.

There have been two key appointments – a corporate marketing manager and a total cost of ownership manager who will focus on SMR and continue Volvo’s plans for regional fleet pricing (pilots are already underway but nothing is set in stone yet).

Volvo has also renewed its business development manager programme with Magma for a further two years.

Dealer training has been “beefed up” – a Business Sales Academy has been set up to equip sales teams and sales managers with the knowledge and skills they need to sell to fleets.

More than 200 sales executives have already been booked on the training programme.

Volvo also aims to put 75 to 100 sales managers through training in the first half of this year.