A STAR IS BJORN

YOU KNOW YOU’RE ON A WINNER WHEN IT’S PARKED ON A STAGE

IF YOU were being offered custody of a long termer, the current Wheels Car of the Year is a damn good place to start. And this is not just any Volvo XC40 I’ve been granted, but the very T5 R-design that appeared on stage at the Australian Motoring Awards to get drenched in gold confetti.

The call for the car to be prepped for its star turn at the AMAS came suddenly and, to my embarrassment, it looked like a Dakar refugee, having been punted at triple figures up a dirt road earlier that morning.

But let’s backtrack a little. You’re probably familiar with this car as it was Ryan Lewis’s long-termer before he upped sticks for a company that paid genuine Australian pesos.

So V1927 is getting another chance to make a first impression and, so far, it’s doing a solid job. As spoilers go, winning COTY kind of clues you into the fact that the XC40’S no clogger, and the good outweighs the bad by about 99 to one. So I’m going to focus on that one percent. It shouldn’t take too long.

Alex Inwood mentioned the seats last month and they’re not the car’s greatest assets. The fronts are mounted a little too high and they’re pretty firm, and narrow too. The further down the XC40 range you go, the comfier the chairs.

The idle-stop system has a maddening propensity to switch itself back on after you’ve cancelled it, and Android Auto also seems to have a fairly patchy strike rate of connecting to my phone. The wireless-charging pad is also too large, which means that your phone will slide on it as you corner, accelerate and brake, sliding right off the charging spot. And that, thus far, is about it in terms of negatives.

We all have an informal ranking of the long-term cars we’ve run, and even after this short honeymoon period, the XC40 is, for me, sitting comfortably in the top spot. This is an optioned flagship model, but $45K for an entrylevel XC40 T4? That’s going to have to be right on my radar when the time comes to replace my own Golf.

Motoring journalist pays actual money for a car? Yep. It’s that good.

REPORT FOUR

VOLVO XC40 T5 Price as tested: $62,710 This month: 2114km @ 8.3L/100km