Volvo Car Gent sits on the canal north of Ghent in East Flanders and is Volvo’s largest car plant by volume, building roughly a third of the company’s output. Prince Bertil of Sweden opened it on 3 November 1965, making it the first Volvo car factory outside Sweden; the first car down the line was a Volvo 120, the Amazon, and the plant could manage 14,000 cars a year.
Today it is rated at about 300,000 cars a year and employs close to 6,600 people, which makes it the largest industrial employer in East Flanders. The current lineup is the electric EX30, EX40 and EC40, the mild-hybrid XC40 and the V60 estate. EX30 production was added in 2025 after a conversion that brought in a new assembly line, several hundred robots and a battery pack facility, shortening European delivery times for a car that until then came only from China.
The line-up is due to change again. The EX40 and EC40 are expected to end production at Ghent from 2027, with their SPA3-platform successors going to Volvo’s new electric-only plant at Kosice in Slovakia. That leaves capacity free at exactly the point Geely has said it wants European production for its own brands, which is why Ghent, rather than Gothenburg or Kosice, is the plant most often named in that context.
