The IT Nerd

The Volvo S60 T6 R-Design is packed full of technology. So much so, I was grateful for the hour that Nelson Baptista of Volvo Of Oakville spent with myself and my wife to get us up to speed. So let me get right to it.

First of all is the key.

It’s a proximity key fob with a hidden key on the inside. Simply have it on your person and walk up to the car. You’ll notice on the handle that there’s an indent for your thumb. Place your thumb on it and the car will unlock. Get in, hit the start button and drive away. Now you can customize this behavior to open one door or all doors. You can also tie the settings for the mirrors and the seats to the key fob. Plus each key fob can have it’s own unique settings. That way the car will automatically set itself up to that driver. The fob itself will lock or unlock the doors. Turn on the headlights to allow you to find the car in a parking lot, or confirm from a distance the car has been locked properly, unlocked, or the alarm was set off. Not to mention the always popular panic button. There’s one other thing. When you get out of the car, you close the door and simply touch the indent that I spoke of earlier. The car locks and you know it’s locked because it will beep and the side mirrors fold in. Net result: You never actually have to take the key fob out of your pocket to get into, drive and lock the car.

Then there’s the safety features. Besides the usual traction control, stability control ABS, and the like are a bunch of cutting edge safety features:

• Adaptive Cruise Control: When you turn this on the car will not only maintain a set speed, it will adjust the speed relative to the cars in front of you and keep a distance that you can choose between the two of you. If the car in front of you slows down, the Volvo will slow down. If the car in front of you speeds up, the Volvo will speed up.
• Distance Alert: You pre-set a distance that you consider “safe” for you to be following another car. If you drive closer than that distance, a red light will appear in bottom of the windshield within your line of sight (in other words, your passenger will likely not see this) and the red light will become more intense the closer you get. That’s a hint that you’re too close and you need to back off a bit. If it thinks that there’s a potential for an avoidable collision, the red light will flash and you’ll hear beeping. I had this happen to me and it does really get your attention.
• There’s dual xenon headlights that turn in the direction that you turn the wheel. That way you can virtually see around corners. Also worth noting, the headlights and taillights are of the automatic variety. Thus you never have to worry about when to turn them on or off, or if you’ve left them on by accident.
• In the event a frontal impact, the engine is designed to slide under the passenger compartment and the steering column is designed to collapse. That way the driver will not be crushed by either.
• In the event of a side collision, the occupants are protected by Volvo’s unique Side Impact Protection System. The steel framework of the car – including the front seats – is designed and reinforced to help displace the impact of a side-collision away from the occupants to other parts of the car body and help prevent intrusion into the cabin.
• In terms of airbags, you get 6. Front airbags for driver and passenger along with side impact airbags. Plus you get head curtain airbags.
• There’s whiplash protection called WHIPS included to protect you from the negative effects of a rear impact.

One of the cool things that this car comes with is City Safety With Full Auto Brake and Pedestrian Detection. I wrote up a explanation of City Safety With Full Auto Brake and Pedestrian Detection a while back, but this was the first time I got a chance to try it. Here’s the scenario. I drove the car up to 20 KM/H and took my foot off the pedals while heading towards a group of pylons. Nelson captured what happened next:

As you can see, the car came to a complete stop by itself. Once that happened, I had to then hit the brakes to keep the car from rolling forward. Impressive! Here’s the hardware behind this system:

In the grill there’s a sensor. It works together with this…

There’s a camera just above the rear view mirror. The two help to detect obstacles and the Volvo makes the call to stop the car if the driver doesn’t take action fast enough. I did it three times and I walked away impressed. This will make a difference in an urban environment and on the open road as well. Besides being used for City Safety, the camera is used for the lane departure warning system. Cross over a lane marker without a turn signal, the car will warn you that you’re doing so. If you do this enough times, a coffee cup will appear in the gauge cluster suggesting that you need a break. If you continue to wander across lanes and you have the cruise control on, the car will disable the cruise control. That of course slows the car down if you don’t have your foot on the pedal which forces you to take control. You then have to turn off the car and turn it on to re-enable cruise control. All of that is part of the Driver Alert System which is invaluable on long drives.

The camera also does one more thing:

The camera will actually read the speed limit signs and display them in the gauge cluster. If you go more than 10% faster than the speed limit. The display will flash. Now this may not be helpful in some parts of Canada (the province of Quebec for example) as you need to be going at least that fast if not faster to keep up with traffic. But in the USA where there are places where you can get a very expensive speeding ticket if you’re just 1 MPH over the speed limit, this can be invaluable. Speaking of the gauge cluster, this can be customized to show all sorts of info such as distance to empty, average fuel economy, and the like. Not to mention the info for the adaptive cruise control and the distance alert feature.

Here’s some other safety tech you should take note of:

The side mirrors have cameras on them which are part of the Blind Spot Information System. It will warn you when there’s something in your blind spot by turning on an amber light inside the car. As I noted in part 3 of this review, the light is well placed inside the car so that you are always aware of what is around you. Another bonus point goes to Volvo for setting up the system to look for cars in a wider zone than most cars with a system of this type.

This is the back-up camera which is located to the top right section of the area where the license plate lives. It gives you this view from the screen inside the car:

It gives you excellent visibility and you can adjust it too look straight back or down towards the ground. Though I have to wonder what happens when the camera gets dirty in the winter. One thing to note is that there is a CAM button on the center console. I used it a few times while parking to confirm that I was fully in a parking space. Very handy! Also note on the right hand side that it has an image of the car. That’s for the parking sensors which are part of the Park Assist system. As you approach objects, it will let you know where they are so you can avoid hitting them both visually and audibly. In my test runs, I found this system the best that I’ve used. The reason being that it picked up low curbs as little as a couple of inches in height. Other cars that I’ve tested completely missed curbs of that height and I never thought twice about it until I tried the S60. Now that I know that this car is that good at picking up curbs that small, I will consider it the standard for others cars to be measured against.

Clearly there is a lot of safety technology in this Volvo. But there’s a lot of other tech as well. Let me start with the audio system which is nothing short of impressive. It’s a 12 speaker system with Dolby Pro-Logic II Surround Sound and a 650-watt Amplifier and MultiEQ XT by Audyssey. If you want top notch audio, make sure you get this system. You will not regret it. You get USB and 1/8″ audio inputs along with Sirius XM for six months. That’s tied to the infotainment system which among other things allows you to pair your phone via Bluetooth (which is an easy process by the way and is not only easy to use but sounds great) for hands free calling and connect your iPod or iPhone via the USB ports to play music. In the case of the latter, I simply plugged my iPhone 5 into the USB port and I had complete access to my playlists and everything else. One thing to note, it seems to me that it is updating this info on the fly rather than doing it up front the way some competitors systems do. That sometimes introduces some lag into the system when scrolling through your songs or playlists. But that lag is brief and not objectionable. Any song be it a MP3 or a AAC file purchased from the iTunes store worked. Plus I got the track info from each song displayed on the 7″ screen located in the center console. I could also stream music via Bluetooth and get the track info displayed on the screen. But I would have to select the song or songs I wanted to play from the iPhone which is typical for these systems.

Now when it comes to the 7″ it’s not a touchscreen, but you control it via a scroll wheel which is similar to one that you find on a mouse along with an exit button on the steering wheel. There’s a redundant knob with buttons on the center console as well. You use the wheel or the knob to highlight the option you want and then you either click the wheel or press OK on the knob to choose it. To back out of a menu option, hit the exit button in either case. The menus are logically laid out and it will only take you a few minutes to figure out where everything is. The system also has functions that relate to the car. You can turn off all the safety systems such as City Safety, DTSC and the like from the infotainment system (not that I would and I don’t recommend that you do either unless you’re doing a track day or something).

The infotainment system also allows you to use voice commands to control it. Now there are two things that stood out for me when it comes to that. First there’s a brief tutorial that explains how the system works. That saves you having to crack open the manual (which is a very good one by the way and as usual, I do recommend you read it). One note, it only works while the vehicle is in park. That’s a very nice touch. The other thing is that there is voice training that allows up to two people to train the system to better recognize their voices. That helps to improve the accuracy of the voice recognition and accounts for accents. Speaking of that, I found it easy to use the voice navigation once I trained it. For example I could enter addresses into the navigation system, though you have to do it the way the system wants you to do it. For example if you want to go to 1234 Main Street, you have to say 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 for the street number. That’s not a bad thing as it guarantees a high accuracy rate. Another thing to note is that as you use your voice, the screen as well as audio will provide you with suggested choices. If you use it enough times, you’ll be able to eventually use it as your main way to control the infotainment system. My advice, spend an hour or two in your garage playing with it until you get comfortable with it before trying to use it on the road.

The navigation system was very competent in terms of it’s routing and it even displayed traffic and construction ahead of me. It is capable of displaying accidents as well, but was hit or miss for me. Sometimes it was accurate, sometimes I would come across an accident that clearly hadn’t been reported to whomever provides these updates. That’s not a negative by the way. It’s just an observation. The upshot of having these sorts of notifications is that it allows you to tell the system to choose an alternate route which is handy. The navigation system also highly customizable. You can do a single screen, or split screens for example. Each with their own views and zoom levels. It should be noted that Volvo owners get two free updates for the maps. The usual options to avoid things like toll roads and the like are present.

Now there are buttons on the center console that among other things, allow you direct access to certain infotainment functions such as the navigation, the backup camera, or the telephone for example. Plus there’s a keypad that looks like one from a phone. Yes you can use it to dial your phone, but they double as radio presets as well. Ingenious! Another thing that stands out, there’s a mute button for the audio. I thought that too was ingenious as I don’t recall seeing that in any other car that I’ve driven recently. You also get the HVAC controls including a pictogram of a person that makes it easy for you to direct the air from the HVAC system to where you want it. The HVAC system also is a dual zone system so that front passengers can ride in comfort with their own settings. Finally, buttons to defeat the some of the safety systems in the car live in the bottom (Not that I’d use them except on a track day). Another thing that I should note. All of these buttons and controls fall easily to hand from the drivers seat. Also the number of buttons in the center console are the exact amount that are required to control the system, unlike something like the Acura TL for example which has a dizzying array of buttons on the center console.

So, how do I rate the technology in the S60 T6 R-Design Platinum? The safety technology is nothing short of cutting edge and impressive. If you want a car that will keep you safe, look no further. As for the infotainment system, it’s great at what it does and is well executed. If you put in the time to learn how to use it, you’ll find that it works very well for you. They help to make this Volvo something that I could easily live with.

The final part of this review will tie up some loose ends and I’ll give you my final verdict.

This entry was posted on July 25, 2013 at 8:28 am and is filed under Products with tags Volvo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.