Spaceship from Sweden
In these days, car manufacturers often try to make every car in their line up as sport as possible. This might be a cool thing when it comes to (hot)hatches or smaller sedans. But with big SUVs like the XC90, its just an unnecessary thing. These things aren't sporty! No matter how stiff you tune the suspension and how sticky tires you put on them, its still a 3-row SUV, designed primarily to haul up to 7 people in comfort and style. And that's why we loved the XC90. It didn't even try to be sporty, instead it was designed to be comfortable and make your day to day life as easy as possible.
On the inside you get the standard Volvo interior, in this iteration with an extra amount of leather. You also get the incredible Bower&Wilkins sound system which is always a joy in every Volvo that comes with it.
The driver assistants in Volvos are also among the very bests on the market, the so called "Propilot Assist", which is Volvo Speech for Autopilot, makes highway driving very relaxing and comfortable.
To be honest, the whole car is incredibly comfortable, also due to its air suspension which dampens out pretty much everything.
This brings me to 3 positive and 3 negative things about the Volvo XC90
Positive:
- Comfort, the biggest plus of the XC90, driving on the highway is just oh so smooth and delightful
- Space, it has huge amounts of cargo space, you could easily transport 7 persons comfortably or massive amounts of cargo, even more with the rear seats folded flat
-Quality, the entire interior and exterior is beautifully made and everything feels worth the money when you touch it.
Negative:
-Size, this might be a little bit controversial since you need to get the cargo space from somewhere, but with almost 5 meters in length and almost 2 meters in width its huge and not that easy to park.
-Powertrain, the 2.0 4 cylinder engine from Volvo is quite an engineering marvel and suits its smaller cars incredibly well. In the 2.4 ton XC90 it always seems a little bit stressed and small, even though it gets you a nice fuel millage of 8.3 litres which is really good for a SUV this size
-Apple CarPlay, even though the XC90 has a huge, 9-inch touch screen in the center, Apple CarPlay only gets displayed on approximately one third of the whole screen.
Overall we were fans of the XC90 and really loved to drive it on the highway while enjoying some music on its excellent B&W speakers while the car smoothed out every rough patch of asphalt.
