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Range-Topper Has V8, Four-Wheel Drive
Elegant, Comfortable Interior; Wide Choice Of Engines
Pity About The Out-Of-Control Gabby, Wordsmiths!  
**** out of 5

“the instrument panel resembles an untouched snow-covered meadow on a winter’s day” 

BASTAD, Sweden When you first look at the new Volvo S80, you’ll probably think that it is a nice looking car, maybe uncannily like the old one; but well, nice.

I doubt if any of you will hyperventilate into paroxysms of pleasure.

So you might be interested in reading what Volvo has to say about its latest creation.

“The inspiration for the car very much comes from nature. It’s like how water has formed a coastline or how the flow of a stream cutting though the landscape feels very natural and comfortable,” says Volvo’s publicity material.

“The exterior has a similar shape as the grey cliffs by the ocean, gently rounded by the water but still holding on to their sharp distinctive features.”

This is of course a car which is big enough to seat 5 in comfort, boasts a 4.4 litre, 315 bhp V8 engine, four-wheel drive, and spews out 284 grams of CO2 for every kilometre it moves.

Dotty
The interior sparks off more dotty hyperbole.

“Or look at the upper part of the instrument panel, resembling an untouched snow-covered meadow on a winter’s day,” says Volvo.

I must admit that I did look closely at the instrument panel after that and with the best will in the world and straining my imagination to its utmost, it looks just like a rather well designed instrument panel, particularly the upper part.

Volvo knows that it has to fend off leading luxury marques like BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Lexus and Jaguar if its new car is to be successful, so I suppose we have to expect a bit of hype. Volvo has chosen its theme for the S80, its top of the range saloon, as Scandinavian Luxury, and keeps repeating the mantra until you feel that the concept must have been around for ages, that it’s an accepted concept in the upmarket world.

I googled “Scandinavian Luxury” and it took five pages before something unrelated to the S80 showed up, and that was some furniture store trying to sell beds.  So I think we can assume this is a concept invented by Volvo. Does the S80 live up to it?

Loopy
Well, first impressions are good. The interior, despite the loopy exaggerations, is simply fabulous. The tan leather on the car I drove was beautiful, the seats comfy and luxurious, and the dash board was as impressive as, well, a snow-covered meadow on a winter’s day, to coin a phrase. I especially liked the central console, which gives the impression of wrapping around you, a bit like a Range Rover’s cockpit, although I don’t see the point of the so-called “floating centre stack”, inherited from the bottom-of-the-range S40 which is a slim panel, fastened at the top of the dash, with storage space behind. I could do without the extra hidden storage space, destined to house rotting sandwiches and like detritus which falls behind there. The steering wheel too, the same colour as the leather, looks a bit stark and very American. Given that this car’s biggest market will be America I suppose that does make sense.

The car is a bit bigger than the old one – all new from the ground up – says Volvo, with a wider track and longer wheelbase, but that doesn’t generate much extra room inside. This extra space has been commandeered by Volvo’s safety types to make better crumple zones and passenger protection. The Side Impact Protection System has been improved with a new type of side collision airbag which has two chambers, one for the hips and one for the chest.

Mondeo under the skin
There will be 5 different engines – the top of the range V8, a 3.2 litre 238 bhp straight six and 2.5 litre 200 bhp petrols, and two diesels -  the D5 - a 2.4 litre five cylinder 185 bhp, and a 2.4 litre 163 bhp motor. The V8, from the XC-90 SUV, will be available with 4-wheel drive (also from the XC-90), and lesser versions may also progressively be available with 4x4.

Prices start at £24,400 (€35,200) for the least powerful diesel S version, and peak out at a whopping £41,725 (€60,299) for the V8 SE Lux. Everything but the S range gets leather seats as standard. The range is completed by SE and SE Sport. The car may be all new, but between 30 and 60 per cent of the bits and pieces underpinning the new S80 will also be found underneath the new upcoming Ford Mondeo. (Volvo is part of Ford’s Premier Automotive Group, with Land Rover, Jaguar and Aston Martin, and you can expect progressively more commonality under the skin of all these products in the name of lowering costs)

Bjorn Borg
The best selling S80 in Europe is likely to be the D5, and although it was a bit noisier than expected when pressed on the roads around this southern Sweden resort and tennis centre, where Bjorn Borg started his career with a tournament win in 1974 aged 17, it powered the S80 along with terrific acceleration and quietness on the motorway.  The six-cylinder automatic box was unobtrusive and efficient. Handling was impeccable, although perhaps not up to the electrifying standard set by the BMW 5 series.

Volvo said it has tuned the suspension to make the car drive much more sharply, and it offers three automatic suspension damping modes – comfort, sport and advanced. This is said to be an advance on the old car, which only had 2 settings. I never did find out just what difference was made by the “advanced” setting, but like the manual override on automatic gearboxes, this is another expensive and impressive innovation which will simply never be used. I can’t imagine any Volvo owner even reaching for the “sport” mode, although the idea of an “advanced” setting might have some appeal to seekers after Scandinavian Luxury.

Safety stuff
This being a Volvo, you would expect some new ideas about safety.  The S80 has Adaptive Cruise Control, which keeps the car a safe distance away from the car in front, and automatically brakes or accelerates to keep a safe distance. The S80 also has Collision Warning with Brake Support, which primes the brakes for action if the system detects that a collision might be imminent, and flashes a warning as a head-up display suggesting that you brake without delay. A blind spot indicator warns you if a car is overtaking out of sight of your wing mirror. There is also a crash avoidance warning which bleeps rather lamely, and too often for your sanity. This can be switched off.

Even the car’s key contributes to safety. It will tell you if an intruder is in your car when you approach it at night by sensing the presence of an underclass heartbeat. It will also have enough memory to tell you when, as the plane takes off, if you’ve remembered to lock the car. Sadly, it won’t yet be able to lock the car from much of a distance, if you discover that you left it exposed to thieving cretins.

More standard goodies
It is not enough for the S80 to be as good as leaders like BMW or Mercedes, there must be a compelling reason to change, and risk the dodgier residual payback when you come to sell the car.  Volvo is trying to use standard features to lure buyers, saying that its SE pack, for instance, includes goodies which would cost more than £1,000 (€1,440) on a similar BMW 5SE or Audi A6 SE.

Volvo types were waxing lyrical about the S80, attempting to talk up its prospects. The car “radiates something nobody else can offer - Scandinavian Luxury – luxury with a smart, human touch inviting an intelligent mix of design and technology. Inside it’s comfortable like a living room experience compared with an airport lounge where you can feel the tension in the air.”

Volvo won’t win any prizes for the subtly of its high-falutin bombast, but the new S80s combination of class, safety and price makes it an interesting and appealing choice.

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Neil Winton – May 12, 2006