The IT Nerd

The XC60 is powered by a a turbocharged 3 litre inline six cylinder that starts out life generating 300 HP and 325 pound feet of torque. But thanks to some software from Polestar, this same engine now puts out 325 HP and 354 pound feet of torque. Now I will admit that this engine has to carry around more weight than the S60 that I drove recently. But the XC60 is still a very entertaining drive as evidenced of being able to pin my wife to the back of the seat when I picked her up from the airport after getting the SUV. Or by carting around four adults to and from dinner the next day and having power to spare when I needed it. I did note is that there appears to be less turbo lag in the XC60 than in the S60. To be fair, there wasn’t a whole lot in the S60, but even less turbo lag is something that is always welcome. The net result is that thanks to the Polestar upgrades, power is always on tap, the delivery of that power is smooth and linear, and you are never left wanting more. I should mention to take full advantage of all of these ponies, you need 91 octane or higher. Though the XC60 will take 87 octane.

The XC60 has a six speed automatic transmission that can be run in three modes:

• Shift it to “D” and the transmission is unbelievably smooth. I could not feel it shift at all. It was incredibly smooth.
• If you slide the gear shift left so that it is set in “S” mode and leave it there, the transmission shifts on its own a more aggressively. In this mode, you can feel the car shift gears, but it is not objectionable.
• In that left most position, you can shift it yourself by pushing the gear shift up or down, or by using the paddle shifters on the steering wheel. The latter addresses a criticism that I had about the S60. By the way, the paddle shifters work exceptionally well. Unlike some other vehicles that shifted gears slowly or didn’t let me shift at all (because I was never really in full control of the transmission), this transmission shifted the instant that I pulled on the paddle shifters. In fact it was so fast that I was convinced for a while that I was dealing with some sort of dual clutch setup. I wasn’t but some research indicated why the shifts were so fast. Volvo tweaked the software that controls the transmission to deliver up to 30% faster shifts in gears 3 to 6 and up to 50% faster shifts in gears 1 – 2. It’s very impressive for those who like to shift gears themselves. It makes me want to ask Volvo to set me up with an S60 to see how it performs in that vehicle. Another note, the paddle shifters work regardless of what position the gear shift lever is in which is something that you can’t do in every vehicle that has paddle shifters. That way you can hold a gear when you need it.

Also present and accounted for is Instant Traction AWD complete with Hill Start Assist and Hill Descent Control and Torque Vectoring. That means it’s at home on the road and off road which is important for SUV owners. I took the liberty of going on a gravel road in Belfountain which is north west of Toronto that had very steep uphills, downhills and sharp turns. It’s usually frequented by the pickup trucks and SUVs that are owned by the farmers in the area so it was full of ruts and shallow depressions. It also rained the night before I went up there which added to the fun. The top speed on this road is 60 KM/H with a lower limit of 20 KM/H in the sharp 90 degree turns. On the uphill sections, my wife and I could really feel the Volvo adjust the torque from front to rear and it felt completely stable the entire time. This was very similar to the S60 that I recently tested. All of this combines to give a 0 – 100 KM/h time of 6.9 seconds according to Volvo. But I decided to see if like the S60 that was conservative. So I took it out to a flat road and used an app called Dynolicious to see what I could do. I managed to get as low as 6.6 seconds once and consistently got 6.7 seconds. That’s not what you would expect to see from an SUV.

There’s nothing that makes it way into the cabin in terms of sound with the exception of some road noise unless you put it into sport mode where you may hear some of the exhaust note. Plus the ride is so smooth, you’d almost never know that Toronto has rather bad roads as most bumps are filtered out. But that’s not to say that the XC60 is geared entirely towards comfort. Body roll is well controlled and I found that the XC60 could really carve corners if you wanted to have some fun. Though if you push it too hard, you’ll be reminded that it’s an SUV due to the high centre of gravity. In short, it handles exceptionally well for an SUV. One thing that really stood out to me, there’s not a whole lot of steering input that I need to use to make the XC60 do what I need it to do. It’s easy to switch lanes with just a flick of a wrist as well as navigate tight parking garages and do U turns. Another thing to note, I never felt that the XC60 was too big. It drove like something much smaller and that’s the good thing in my books. You can easily use the accelerator to crawl through stop and go traffic and on the open road you can deliver the right amount of power to get the speed you want. The brakes are easy to modulate and bring you to a stop smoothly. In terms of fuel economy, I’m averaging 10.6 L/100 KM which is pretty good in my books.

The next part of the review will look at the interior which is a very exceptional one. Stay tuned for that.

This entry was posted on October 15, 2013 at 8:17 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.