Volvo’s Handpainted Midsummer Crossover Will Almost Certainly Not Kill Your Terrible Boyfriend And His Awful Friends In A Cult Ritual

Photo: Volvo

Have you ever seen the Ari Aster film Midsommar? It’s a feel-good, coming of age, found-family movie about a girl visits Sweden with her shitty boyfriend and his shitty friends. Spoiler warning. The group is slowly killed off in ritual sacrifice, one by one, while our main girl is adopted into the cult by the film’s end.

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Volvo’s latest marketing effort, a hand-painted C40 Recharge EV, is meant to celebrate the same midsummer festivities that the Hårga honored in that film. But, unlike the friendly faces from Aster’s movie, the Volvo probably won’t get rid of your terrible significant other and his grad school cohorts.

Photo: Volvo

Artist Shai Dahan will paint the EV and turn it into “a hand painted representation of Midsummer in New York City.” Volvo claims it will be a mix of Swedish and American influences, reflecting Dahan’s own history as an LA-born, Sweden-based artist.

Most interestingly, the car’s painting process will be public. The C40 is located in Volvo’s Chelsea studio, and the doors are open for folks to wander through and watch Dahan at work. It’s the centerpiece of a full array of Swedish midsummer fare — maypole dances, food, flower wreaths, and more.

Volvo claims the car’s outdoors-inspired art reflects the company’s “commitment to a more sustainable planet” — hence the choice of the C40 Recharge as a canvas. Whether paint on a car actually helps make any environmental message is its own question, but there’s no denying that the deaths of Christian and his idiot friends took all their future carbon emissions out of the global equation. The bar’s been set, Volvo. You’re gonna have to do something big to be more eco-friendly than the Hårga.