Volvo V60: Everything you need to know about the suprisingly youthful car
No one ever accused Volvo of putting motoring excitement before safety, but the Swedish firm’s latest offering threatens to broaden its appeal beyond Lib Dem architects
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Your support makes all the difference.Volvo estate. Two words that surely fill any virile motoring hack with dread. A phrase to slow the pulses, to cool the blood, to dull the senses. The Volvo estate is more interesting – fascinating indeed – as a social phenomenon than as a driving machine.
The Volvo estate, indeed, could easily find a place in one of those lists of modern artefacts that made the world we are in today. Someone has even written quite a good book about it (Design Icon and Faithful Companion, published by Veloce, by the way).
So I was very surprised to find that at least one version of the new Volvo V60 took decades off my life (not my life expectancy, by the way, which wouldn’t leave much, but the unexpected rejuvenating effects of the car).
It’s a thug, in fact. Fitted with a nice big (2-litre) petrol engine, supercharged and turbocharged, albeit a four-cylinder, and all-wheel drive the Volvo V60 turned me into a twentysomething again, and, sunroof open, windows down and excellent Bowers and Wilkins audio system at near full blast I was, for a time, young again. Or at least I could convince myself I was.
Like everything you’ll find in the cosmetics section of a department store, it’s an illusion that does more for your mental wellbeing than your physical appearance. Worth, doing, then, but you’ve got to be realistic about what’s happening.
In the past, Volvo have created some performance estate models such as the 850 T5, nicknamed the “Flying Brick”, and developed for the British Touring Car Championships. But they were a sort of Swedish joke, which worked on the basis of juxtaposition with the usual stuff. The new V60 might be an interesting contender for a future BTCC challenge.
The disappointing news is that this particular T6 petrol variant, available to the world’s media on the launch event, probably isn’t coming to the UK. Instead you’ll have to make do with the T4 which is not quite the same thing (a test of that one will follow in due course).
The British will get a choice of diesel units, however, of which I tried the gutsier of the two, the D4. This was pretty lively but, well, it is a diesel. It’s clean (Euro 6 standard, the latest and probably unaffected by any new anti-diesel measures), and I don’t think Volvo is the type of firm to fiddle its numbers.
The spec
Volvo V60 D4 Inscription Auto
Price: Range from £31,550 (£37,600 as tested)
Engine capacity: 2.0-litre diesel; 4-cylinder; 8-speed automatic
Power output (hp@rpm): 190@4,250
Top speed (mph): 137
0-62 mph (seconds): 7.6
Fuel economy (mpg): 61.4
CO2 emissions (g/km): 122
BIK %: 29
Thus, in those instance at any rate, your fears about the future if diesel are probably exaggerated by some sensational reporting.
Having said all that, after the smooth and ultra-refined petrol T6, I found that the diesel unit just didn’t suit the v60d’s surprisingly agile and willing personality (ie well-engineered chassis). The alternative (again not yet tested) is the less powerful D3, which I fear may be a bit workaday for the enthusiast. Next year will come some petrol electric hybrids, a surprising delay for a company that has told us that no new Volvo model will be without some sort of electric power unit on board. When they do arrive I hope the petrol-electric hybrids, with all-wheel drive for grip, give us the best of all worlds.
So that’s the Volvo V60. You already know it, as with its predecessors, as a middle-class icon, a cliché, even. You can probably guess that its archetypal owner, or leaser nowadays, is a Liberal Democrat professional such as an architect. They’ll be family folk, living in one of the nicer suburbs, cathedral cities or market towns. Maybe an early pioneer of inner-city gentrification. They’ll be guilty about the environment, concerned about the diesel thing, safety conscious and wouldn’t want to be too flash, and would tend to avoid the obvious German stuff for one reason or another. And of course anything Scandi is cool right now.
The V60 is, for them, whatever happens to be under the bonnet. If they’ve got a current model V60, or the earlier V70, they need to know that Volvo claims its new car offers class-leading luggage space, which is perhaps not saying much seeing as the modern generation of “sports estates” usually don’t have much room in the back anyway. You need to go to Ford, Vauxhall or Peugeot for that now. There’s a bit more room in the back for passengers, with a longer wheel-base that cuts the overhang at the front (good for balance too) and adds a little at the rear.
I asked Volvo for the luggage capacity of older boxy classics such as the (60 and 240, and I discovered that they were bigger and more practical back then, with wide flat-load spaces you can fit a wardrobe into. The V60 is more a car for the Ikea generation: if you’re an antiques dealer you’ll need to look elsewhere for something to transport your tall boy in. The Swedish for boot space, by the way, is bagageutrymme, which amused me.
The V60 does succeed in having a “premium” feel. The “sensus” system for accessing the electronics is intuitive and the vertical portrait-format touchscreen works well, with most of the controls accessible via steering wheel buttons and dials, and by speech commands
It has some very advanced safety and autonomous driving features, and some that are less obvious, such as a system of dampers in the seats that protect you from a spinal injury in the event your car leaves the road. Volvo still takes safety seriously, even though it doesn’t go on about it as much as it used to (maybe because so many other makes have followed its lead too).
My only quibbles were that, in very bright sunshine, the top of the dash reflects onto the windscreen too much, and it doesn’t have the very latest pad where you can recharge your (very latest) smartphone via induction.
The V60 of choice would, then, be the petrol T6, and, failing that, you should hold out for the petrol-electric hybrid T6 next year, and spec it to make your Volvo as futureproof as you can. Otherwise I’d say opt for the base D3 with a manual gearbox, cloth upholstery but most of Volvo’s fabled safety equipment and easy-to-use software on board as standard. Lib Dem architects will love it.
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