Volvo’s mid-size SUV was Europe’s best-selling best-seller in 2015, according to numbers crunched by automotive research firm JATO.

That’s despite being launched in 2008, and in its full year on the market starting a meteoric rise that made it the top selling model in Volvo’s range.

After that, the XC60 went on to be competitive against the likes of the Mercedes-Benz GLK, BMW X3 and Audi Q5 on a regular basis, to the point of outselling all of them last year.

Currently, Europe remains Volvo’s most important sales region, representing more than half of the Swedish automaker’s global sales in total.

In its ninth year of production, the XC60 has found its way into more than 750,000 garages, while last year, almost 160,000 units were sold around the globe, with markets such as China, the US and Sweden becoming the most important ones.

Thus, the Swedish automaker’s ongoing transformation from a borderline premium manufacturer to a genuinely premium one is clearly going as planned.

The future looks even brighter as the all-new XC90 is also a hit and customers have expressed great interest in the the S90 saloon and its upcoming V90 estate variant.

Here are the XC60 total sales breakdown – and each year being more successful than the previous is admittedly not a trend we see very often.

2008 – 6,954 units
2009 – 61,667 units
2010 – 80,723 units
2011 – 97,183 units
2012 – 106,203 units
2013 – 114,010 units
2014 – 136,993 units
2015 – 159,617 units

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