Volvo Cars opened its first U.S. factory Wednesday in Berkeley County and unveiled the redesigned S60 sedan that will be built there starting this fall.

“The Charleston plant establishes the US as our third home market,” Volvo Cars CEO Håkan Samuelsson said in a company statement. With the plant, Volvo now has factories in all three of its major sales regions, the company said.

Volvo is investing about $1.1 billion in its U.S. manufacturing operations and will create about 4,000 jobs at the site over the coming years, the company said. It expects about 1,500 people to be employed there by the end of this year.

“The opening of our first American factory is a very big deal,” said Anders Gustafsson, president and CEO of Volvo Car USA.

What the plant will build

The S60 is a midsize sedan built on Volvo’s Scalable Product Architecture. Production starts in the fall, the company said, and Live 5 News reported that the first cars will roll off the line in late August or early September. The S60 will be priced from $35,800 to $55,400, depending on features, the station reported.

From 2021, the factory will also build the next generation of the XC90 SUV, Volvo said. At full capacity, the plant can produce 150,000 cars a year.

Cars built in Ridgeville will be sold in the United States and exported. “Of course our idea with those cars is not only produce for the US, it’s to export. Half of the production will export,” Javier Varela, Volvo’s senior vice president of manufacturing and logistics, told Live 5 News.

The site covers 1,600 acres, and the building space totals 2.3 million square feet, according to Volvo. The campus includes an office building for up to 300 employees in research and development, purchasing, quality and sales.

A glitzy reveal

Volvo threw a glitzy party for the S60’s reveal and livestreamed the ceremony, The Associated Press reported. More than a dozen of the nearly 1,500 employees already working at the plant were called up to share their stories, according to the AP. Accounts of the current headcount varied: company officials told ABC News 4 that about 900 people work at the plant, and Bloomberg reported that S60 production would start with 1,100 employees.

Gov. Henry McMaster attended, as did U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who was governor when Volvo chose South Carolina in 2015, according to the AP. ABC News 4 reported that Haley’s visit was a surprise.

“We have a great product. Now we have a great plant. And we have a fantastic team in place,” Katarina Fjording, Volvo’s vice president of manufacturing and logistics, told ABC News 4.

Gustafsson said the U.S. is where Volvo needs to grow. “Our American business is developing extremely well with strong growth. Sales this year are up 41 percent,” he told Live 5 News.

Trade clouds

The plant opened in a much different trade environment than when Volvo announced it three years ago, the AP reported. President Donald Trump, elected a year after the announcement, has threatened tariffs that could disrupt the global car market.

Volvo executives said Wednesday they want to end all tariffs between the U.S., Europe and China, where Volvo’s parent company, Geely, is based, according to the AP.

“We will export as many cars from this factory as we will import in the U.S.; Volvo will in three years’ time have a neutral balance of trade. That is a good example of how trade with cars should work in an open and free economy,” Samuelsson said, the AP reported.

Sweden’s ambassador to the U.S. called on the dignitaries in the audience to remind the president how tariffs hurt trade. “A plant like this does not need it,” she said, according to the AP.

Building the S60 in South Carolina lets Volvo sidestep tariffs that Trump plans to apply to Chinese-made cars, Bloomberg reported. Volvo has been building the S60 in China and importing it. But the model accounted for less than 9% of Volvo’s U.S. sales through May, so most of the lineup is still exposed to import taxes, according to Bloomberg. Volvo imported all 81,651 vehicles it sold in the United States last year.

“With all the nervousness we have now in the business, we are very glad that we are here with a local factory,” Samuelsson said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “Without that, we would be even more worried about the future.”

From announcement to opening

Volvo announced the plant in May 2015 and broke ground that September. The company’s collective investment in the plant has climbed above $1 billion, Live 5 News reported, up from the $500 million announced in 2015.

Volvo says it will build plug-in hybrid cars at all of its plants. In 2017, it became the first global carmaker to announce that all new models from 2019 would be electrified, the company said.