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 Post subject: Answering a question no one has asked: a V60 review
PostPosted: Sun Oct 24, 2021 10:12 am 
Bone stock

Joined: Sun Aug 29, 2021 2:05 pm
Posts: 6
hi:
Sadly.. no one has bought the winter wheels and tires I have from my XC70, but then it has not snowed in Calgary yet so I expect that to change soon enough.

Meanwhile I thought people might be interested in a quick review of my new V60. This started out as a 2021 momentum /T6 assigned to a sales manager at Valentine who maxed out every almost option in the book - including polestar. I added the skid plate ($700). winter wheels (18" but only Michelin x-ice - Volvo Canada must have a deal with them ($3K)., so blizacks next year) and front/rear recording cameras with GPS and 128GB ($800 installed).

So:
summary: awesome, marvelous, great.

0 - bad things: Voice control on navigation is comically bad. The exhaust is tuned to make sports car noises I could do without. I'd prefer a gas filler cap that unlocks separately from the car itself.

1 - 0-100 in about 5.5 seconds, based entirely on gut feel and no actual test I think that it will cruise at 180 and use about 14.7 L/100 doing it on a flat(ish) road like highway 2 south of Claresholm. (You can get it down to about 4.7 l/100 in cruise, on an empty highway at about 85km/hr but it seems to average about 9.2/3 in general use for me.) 100-->0 is somewhere around 110 feet on dry.

2 - much of the electronic stuff comprising the more expensive options can be made to disappear into the background where it works but doesn't annoy you. For example, the personal profile works well for us because the wife and kid rarely get to drive the wagon (they share an older S60). Heads up display looks gimmicky, but is great. Locks and lights "just work" as does rain sensing. Ph and music from an iphone is hassle free.

3 - it defaults to "comfort mode" on startup where I'd prefer polestar but you can set everything except shift points to polestar in the profile so comfort mode works well.

4 - it has a couple of nice surprises: for example, cruise control defaults to 30km/hr if you're below that so slowing before a school zone to 20+ and turning it on gets you through at exactly 30 - and, I've long disliked adaptive cruise control because it lets the other guy drive your car , wears down brakes, and is a killer on ice but on this you can set the following distance to BWM (or cheap van) and it works just like a normal cruise control except that it will save your (blank) if you do goof off.

5 - the turning circle is very tight (it can do right angle intersections at 60+) and there's very little difference in response as you go faster - except for one rather nasty side effect of the AWD system. If you are not in polestar mode it's really a front wheel drive machine, but hit a steep curve at speed and some power will shift to the outer rear wheel giving it a bit of an understeer feel. It's not much, but on a twisty two lane road like that leading to Panorama (BC) it can give you the feeling that you're about to cross the white line into an oncoming bus. You are not, but there's a real tendency to twitch the wheel..and breathe a bit faster afterward.

6 - Bottom line? some cars are stodgy solid citizens (my XC70-T6): reliable, sane, and boring. This one, like my 81 GLT and 99V70R isn't that: it's a perky twenty something with an attitude and I love it.


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 Post subject: Re: Answering a question no one has asked: a V60 review
PostPosted: Mon Oct 25, 2021 10:27 am 
Haha, I just built a W24 Octo-Turbo, now what?!
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Joined: Wed Dec 21, 2005 8:40 pm
Posts: 3492
Location: Calgary, Ab
Interesting! I don't know many (any) people with Volvos built after about 2006 or 7, so it's informative to hear how really modern ones behave. The "comfort" mode default would annoy me but that 30 kph cruise default does seem like a great idea. Volvo navigation systems are historically comically bad, and if they learned anything from Ford the voice control will not help it much. The rain sensing in my '04 S60 works great... but a quirk is that the next time you start the car the rain sensing wipers don't work until you turn the wipers off and then back to rain sensing mode again. My wife's Escape just stays in rain sensing mode all the time and it just works, until a fella goes to scrape the frost off her windshield in which case the wipers attack. Maybe that's why Volvo did what they did.

But you never use cruise on ice - everybody has been taught that!

I haven't paid much attention: what does the Polestar option give you? Volvo has been using Polestar to market their electric vehicle, so is yours a hybrid? Plug-in?


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