The fast and the frugal
Wagons are cool. Volvo wagons are cooler. Fast Volvo wagons are the coolest, writes Damien O’Carroll.
driving to work and back the fuel consumption readout sat on 0.6L/100km, before a few longer trips that depleted the battery saw it settle on 2.3L/100km. A hard thrash on a winding back road saw this balloon to 4.3L/100km, while a day commuting again saw it drop back down to 3.9L/100km – a few more days of mainly electric commuting would have easily dropped it back into the 2s.
Well . . . no. It does have its compromises.
That hard back road thrash showed very quickly it isn’t the most enthusiast-driver oriented car, with a strong bias towards comfort (and it is superbly comfortable) that sees things get uncomfortably floaty quickly when you use all of that prodigious power, while the steering is distant and remote. Meaning I really couldn’t replicate my childhood fantasy of driving a roadgoing version of the 850 Estate BTCC car. Back to Forza . . .
But the Xbox will do fine for living those fantasies, because the V60 is very much a comfortable luxury cruiser that would be perfectly suited to blasting across continental Europe at autobahn speeds, so makes effortless work of open road travel in New Zealand.
The bigger disappointment is the fact that it doesn’t quite lean hard enough into the whole electric thing – while it is capable of running purely on battery power, it never offers a ‘‘full’’ EV mode, only ever giving you around half the throttle pedal travel on electric only before the petrol engine kicks in.
While it is easy enough to drive around town keeping it in battery power only using the throttle, it means that invigoratingly electric full throttle blasts away from traffic lights are off the table.
But at the end of it all, these are really only minor quibbles in what is an impressively comfortable, staggeringly frugal and seriously quick car. It also happens to be a very sexy-looking wagon.
Not really, at least, not in conventional wagon form anyway.
BMW and Mercedes offer PHEV versions of equivalently sized and priced SUVs and sedans, but not the wagon versions. The closest wagon BMW offers is the M340i xDrive that packs a conventional (but excellent) 285kW inline six-cylinder engine and knocks off the 0-100 sprint in the same time as the Volvo, but costs $10k more and is nowhere near as frugal.
Mercedes has something similar with its AMG C43 Estate that packs a 287kW turbo V6 and is fractionally slower than the Volvo to 100kmh (4.7 seconds), but costs close to $15k more and, again, is nowhere near as frugal. Both are more engaging driver’s cars though.