Review: Hands-on mandatory, but Ars lets Volvo’s XC90 drive itself in traffic

Volvo's XC90 SUV marks a new chapter for the Swedish automaker. It's the first vehicle to be built using Volvo's new Scalable Product Architecture (SPA), a platform that's also used by the new S90 sedan and V90 station wagon. The XC90 is also destined to be Volvo's best-selling vehicle here in the US—by April of this year, the company had already found customers for almost 11,000 XC90s in one of the most competitive segments in the market.

The XC90 is a vehicle packed with clever technology. Much of this technology has to do with Volvo's core focus on safety of course—which now means lots of active semi-autonomous driver assists—but this SUV marks the debut of the company's new Sensus infotainment system, too. On top of all that, the T8 variety of this range-topping vehicle is a hybrid. After spending several hundred miles in both T6 and T8 versions of the XC90, it was easy to come away with an appreciation for Sweden's latest.

The mechanical bits

Under the substantial hood of both models is a 2.0L, four-cylinder direct injection gasoline engine belonging to a new family of engines called Drive-E that first started appearing in Volvos in 2013. Volvo makes multiple variants of the new engine, including a diesel version. But the T6 and T8 use the engine's most potent form, with both a turbocharger and supercharger—the result is 316hp (235kW) and 295 lb-ft (400Nm).

In the T6, that power is sent to all four wheels via an eight-speed automatic transmission from Aisin. The T8, however, only uses the internal combustion engine to power the front wheels. Instead of running a driveshaft from the engine to the rear wheels, the T8 fills that space with a 9.2kWh lithium ion battery used to power an 87hp (65kW), 177 lb-ft (240Nm) electric motor to drive the rear wheels. (There's also another motor/generator unit up front that starts the internal combustion engine and recovers energy under braking.) Add those numbers up, and the T8 has 400hp (299kW) and 472 lb-ft (640Nm) on demand, making it quite the powerful hybrid SUV.

Weight reduction was obviously an important goal for Volvo with the XC90, but it has eschewed aluminum for boron steel (used for about 40 percent of the car). Volvo says it prefers this material for crash safety. Although the XC90 is about 200lbs (90kg) lighter than the previous generation, it's still a substantial car—4,627lbs (2,098kg) for the T6 and 5,205lbs (2,360kg) for the T8. OK, "light" may have been misleading, but then again we are talking about a seven-seat SUV packed with creature comforts.

The SPA platform was designed from the ground up to allow for hybrid powertrains, and Volvo says SPA has removed some of the traditional constraints of car design. Compare the T8 hybrid to BMW's X5 xDrive 40e, for example: the BMW has to stash its hybrid batteries underneath the cargo area at the back of the car, which impinges on storage space and means there's a whole lot of extra mass out over one axle. That setup doesn't do great things for handling.

You said this car was clever?

Volvo is one of the industry leaders when it comes to autonomous vehicles, and so the XC90 is packed with the latest systems you would expect in a flagship model. The systems are part of the company's "Vision 2020" plan—the goal of building cars so safe that by 2020 no one is killed or seriously injured in a new Volvo.

For example, there's City Safety—what Volvo calls its automatic emergency braking system—which can detect other vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists in your path. If this system thinks you're in danger of hitting another car and the speed differential is under 31mph (50km/h), the car will bring you to a complete stop. At anything above 19mph (30km/h), the front seatbelts tighten up. The pedestrian detection works at speeds under 43mph (70km/h), and Volvo tells us that it should avoid the collision completely as long as your speed is under 27mph (45km/h)—any faster and you'll still hit them, but at a much-reduced velocity. City Safety will also slam on the anchors if it detects that you're about to turn across the path of an oncoming car at an intersection.

The XC90 also packs the usual array of sensors—ultrasonic ones for parking, optical cameras that provide a 360-degree top-down view of the car while reversing, and another forward-looking camera for the adaptive cruise control. Adaptive cruise works in much the same way we've seen in cars like the Audi A4 and Tesla Models S and X (although without Tesla's automatic lane changing capability).

The lane-centering system does feel a generation behind Audi's latest, however. Where that car will keep you pinned to the middle of your lane, the XC90's system reacts when you get too close to the white lines, steering you back toward the other side of the lane. The effect is a bit like a bowling ball traveling down a lane fitted with those kiddie bumpers (the same thing happens with, say, an Audi A7), and it doesn't encourage hands-free driving (for that matter, neither do we).

The traffic jam assist, on the other hand, works extremely well with one caveat: the car has to be able to see lane markers on the road in front of it. If that's the case, and you're in stop-go traffic at speeds under 37mph (60km/h, a speed that we believe has to do with German regulations), the car will completely take over.

“With the XC90, we take the first step towards self-driving cars. A new function that automatically follows the vehicle ahead in stop-and-go traffic will provide a radically simplified, semi-autonomous driving experience,” said Lex Kerssemakers, Volvo's vice president of product strategy and vehicle line management.

So the XC90 steers for itself and will accelerate or brake as necessary to keep sufficient distance between you and the vehicle in front. We tested the system briefly last summer, but this time we put it to much more of a workout on the clogged highways around New York City. It really is a fantastic system, and for commutes that expose you to significant jams on multi-lane roads (think DC's beltway for example) it really comes into its own.

For city-street traffic jams? Not so much, unfortunately. The sensors are quite picky about finding those lane markers, and on broken urban streets traffic jam assist was often unavailable. (Surprisingly, the XC90 had no such problems on highways even when I could barely see the lane markers myself. Nighttime doesn't appear to faze it in that regard.)

The XC90's tech chops don't start and end with semi-autonomous driving, though. As mentioned, this is the first Volvo to feature the company's new infotainment system. It's called Sensus, and we first got a look at it during 2014's LA Auto Show. Our time with the pair of XC90s was the first real opportunity we've had to try Sensus in real-world conditions, and we feel confident in saying that it really is one of the very best infotainment systems available right now. (No joke—it even impressed Ron Amadeo!)

In front of the driver is a 12.3-inch digital display, which has your speedometer, powertrain info, and a configurable space in the middle for navigation or other information. The gauges will change depending on the car's drive mode, and everything is controllable with the steering wheel's buttons. One aspect that we think Volvo could improve on would be the trip information that you can choose to display on this screen (we found it to be confusing at times). When the rest of the user interface is as good as the XC90's, small details like this can stand out like John Siracusa's OS X Terminal font kerning complaints.

In the center stack is a 9-inch touchscreen, which is where you'll find most of the action. It uses a tile-based UI and behaves almost exactly as you would expect. You can access three different pages of displays by swiping left or right, and you can pull down a settings menu from the top. Tapping one of the tiles expands it to fill more (but not all) of the screen. At the very bottom are persistent icons for climate control and seat heaters/coolers that will never change position, so owners should be able to build up the muscle memory to use them without looking at the screen. Underneath the display is a home button that also resets the system if you press and hold.

Typically, touchscreens in vehicles can be a hit-or-miss affair. Some car makers won't use them at all, and others (I'm thinking about you, General Motors) use ones that just aren't very good. The XC90's is a hit. Despite the fact that it uses IR to track your finger inputs, it was so responsive that it fooled us into thinking it was a capacitive screen. (In practice, a capacitive screen wouldn't work as well in a car because people drive in winter, and no one wants to take their gloves off when it's below freezing and the car's not warmed up yet.)

A particularly neat feature of Sensus is the way that it runs CarPlay (and later this year, Android Auto) as a window within the display. Every other implementation of CarPlay we've used takes over the entire infotainment screen, but, with a portrait display like this one, that would mean a lot of dead space. Instead, here you can still access other functions within Sensus without dropping out of CarPlay—well done Volvo.

What's not quite so well done is the fact that the car comes with only a single USB port. We're sorry, but in 2016 that just doesn't cut the mustard. To make matters worse, the USB port wasn't working in the T8. Had there been more than one this wouldn't have been an issue. It seems like an odd misstep for what's otherwise an extremely well thought out infotainment system.

Oddly, while Sensus in the T6 behaved flawlessly, the system wasn't quite so well-behaved in the T8. It froze a couple of times on startup, requiring the car to be turned off and then on again to get things working. Had we not had such a great experience with the system in the T6, we'd be dinging Volvo more strongly on this.