Road test review: Volvo V60 T8 R-Design

Wednesday, 5 February 2020

**VOLVO V60 T8 R-DESIGN

Base price:** $114,900

Powertrain and economy: 2.0-litre inline four-cylinder turbo and supercharged petrol with electric motor, 246kW/430Nm (electric motor 65kW/240Nm), 8-speed automatic, AWD, combined economy 2.0 L/100km, CO2 46g/km (source: RightCar).

The V60 couldn't be further from the boxy 850 Estate touring car, but it still packs a punch.

Vital statistics: 4761mm long, 1427mm high, 2872mm wheelbase, luggage capacity 529 litres, 19-inch alloy wheels.

We like: Very fast and very frugal, remarkably comfortable, just look at it!

Fast and sexy it may be, but the V60 is also vastly practical.

We don't like: No pure electric mode, distant steering, not a big fan of corners

Volvo might be producing some excellent SUVs these days - and that might be all the general market cares about - but it still knows how to build a damn fine wagon. And the V60 T8 is a perfect example of that.

The V60's interior is typically Volvo - minimalist, but luxuriously comfortable.

Perfect? That's a bold claim. Are you sure you're not just a tragic Volvo station wagon fanboy?

Well, of course I am - after all, anyone who grew up watching the awesome 850 Estate touring car getting its elbows out (and two wheels in the air) in the BTCC in the mid-90s is almost certainly a tragic Volvo station wagon fanboy today. I mean, how could you not be? Plus, wagons are just awesome anyway.

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Volvo ditched the ruler a long time ago, now they are all about sleek and sexy.

But the V60 in T8 R-Design form is a car that almost literally proves that you can have your cake and eat it too. As long as you cake is made up of wagon practicality with serious performance and astonishingly frugal economy.

The wagon practicality thing is obvious - it is a wagon, with loads of space in the back and clever Volvo touches, like the flip up divider adding to the overall air of sensible wagon ownership.

But the twist is the T8 drivetrain that consists of a 2.0-litre petrol engine driving the front wheels and an electric motor driving the rears.

Ah, so it's a hybrid - that's where the frugal economy comes from then?

Yes, but it is also where the serious performance comes from - you see, that 2.0-litre petrol engine pumps out an impressive 246kW of power, thanks to the fact that it is both turbo and supercharged, while the electric motor up the back provides a further 65kW (for a system total of 311kW), as well as bringing an additional 230Nm of torque to compliment the twin-charged engine's 430Nm up front.

This produces a practical wagon that is capable of thundering to 100km from a standing start in just 4.5 seconds. That's supercar time from not all that long ago, and the V60 feels a very fast thing indeed when you drop the throttle.

The belligerent acceleration is accompanied by a unique and endearing guttural snarl when in 'Polestar Engineered' mode (which is Volvo-speak for 'sport mode'), which is a pleasantly surprising contrast to the silence it cruises around town in.

Surely it can't be that 'astonishingly frugal' if it is that fast, can it?

That's where the hybrid-y magic comes in - the T8 is a plug-in hybrid that packs enough battery-on range for the average daily commute (40km on the readout, which usually translates easily into around 30 to 35km under real world conditions).

The first few days I spent just 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.

Sounds like it is the perfect car then. Is it?

Well… no. It does have its compromises.

That hard back road thrash showed very quickly that 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 road-going version of the 850 Estate BTCC car. Ah well, 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 here 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 offer 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. That also happens to be a very sexy-looking wagon.

Any other cars I should consider?

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 thoroughly 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.