Ah yes, the Volvo. Firstly, it cost us a fortune, and I think we were both culpable in being too swiftly talked into a bigger car than the one we'd ordered. Ultimately it doesn't matter, though, because while it dented the budget, it didn't blow it up. It's a very nice car, too, but perhaps a bit of an extravagance.
The XC-60 is quite a big SUV, even though by North American standards it's officially "Mid-range". In the car parks of Devon it stands out by its height and its length, if not its width. It's very high off the ground, too, so much so that when DW swung her legs around to get out, her feet were still a few inches from the ground. Apparently, you can depress the suspension to lower it a bit, but we never did find out how to do it The silly thing is that it's certainly no bigger than our car at home, the Toyota Sienna minivan, but it certainly feels it.
The car is also a hybrid, that is it has batteries and an electric motor to drive the thing along, as well as a standard internal combustion (IC) engine. It took me a while to work out how best to use the electric power, because you could force it to use the batteries, or the IC, or let the thing decide for itself. Obviously leaving it on IC would mean that you're carrying a pile of heavy batteries around for no reason, and that uses extra fuel. You could force it to run on electric power, but its range was only about 40 miles, and give it any type of hill and that was halved almost instantly. No, the best thing was to leave it on "Auto" and see what happened. Barrelling along the motorway at 70mph was obviously what the IC was for, but get stuck in the traffic and it'd shut the IC down and roll gently on the batteries. This was a "Plug In" hybrid, so you could start the day on fully charged up batteries and for short commutes stay on batteries, but for general driving, the Auto function seemed the best way forward, especially as I had nowhere to plug the thing into.
There was a fuel (gas) usage counter and that said 35mpg, but I think that only counted the miles while under IC power because it was doing better than 35mpg when the batteries took over occasionally. Anyway, I fuelled up four times over the 2000 miles I drove, which was OK for such a heavy car.
The interior of the car was too black for my liking, but that's the modern way. The driver and passenger seat are adjustable in about a million variations, and there were four bum-warmers (seat heaters). The cameras that spring to life when you're reversing, or getting close to something in a car park, are quite impressive, and the range of goodies available though the big LED screen seems endless, although most of those couldn't possibly be safely accessed while driving. The heating controls alone had a billion variations and there's no way you can drive and sort that lot out at the same time, which is why my co-pilot did most of the screen work.
The navigation system uses Google Maps, which is hands down the best, and cheapest, system on the market; type in "Bigbury Mint" without an address and it knew just how to get you there. Even Google Maps has its limitations of course, and you have to treat it with a bit of scepticism, but overall I like it. There has to be some kind of subscription for that, though, because it uses mobile/cell phone towers for it's constant updating, and that's not free. The school buses I drove had the same system, and that definitely wasn't free.
I wasn't keen on the interior décor, it seems a bit too eclectic up front, and there are some odd limitations that we discovered. I said earlier that the switch gear doesn't seem intuitive, at least not to a non-Volvo driver, but when I tried to use the mirror heaters to dry off the water that had collected on the mirrors themselves, the heaters would not work independently of the entire defrosting system. To dry the mirrors, the interior of the car had to be blasted with hot air. That seems like an omission to me.
The ultimate question of course is, would I buy a hybrid XC-60? The short answer is no. Actually, the long answer is no as well, especially as the top of the range model in Canada retails at around CDN$95,000. But, at least I've quickly learned the limitations of hybrid cars, so maybe this has been a meaningful lesson for me; go full EV or not at all.
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