► CAR lives with Volvo’s sporty S60
► It’s a Polestar-fettled PHEV
► Colin spends time with his long-termer
I keep being singled out by well-intentioned oncoming drivers, who’ll flash their lights to warn me that I’m approaching a speed-detector van. Except I’m never (well… never-ish) exceeding the limit these days.
It’s unlikely to be the yellow seatbelts that are making those keen-eyed opposite-lane occupants think that I’m pushing my luck – they’re bright, but you’d have to be pretty close to the car to actually see them. Similarly, the yellowy-gold Öhlins brake calipers are not obvious at a distance.
So I think it must be the way the S60 sits on the road, the confident headlights and the glorious elan of the lines. There are few visual differences between the Polestar Engineered version and any other S60 – grille, badge, wheels – so Volvo can take this as a tribute to the fundamental rightness of the saloon’s shape, and the glorious way the light catches its curves. Not that anyone’s buying saloons these days, but that’s their loss.
And never mind the fact that, compared to the key German and Italian benchmarks, it’s not really that sharp. It looks the part.
By Colin Overland
Logbook: Volvo S60 T8 Polestar Engineered
Price £51,100 (£57,810 as tested)
Performance 1969cc turbocharged and supercharged four-cyl, 11.6kWh battery, PHEV, 400bhp, 4.4sec 0-62mph, 112mph
Efficiency 104.5mpg (official), 35.8mpg (tested), 48g/km CO2
Energy cost 17.9p per mile
Miles this month 1475
Total miles 7867
Month 6 living with a Volvo S60 Polestar Engineered: a little here, a little there
Like a spy scoping out the exits and hiding places of every room they enter, I’ve become very keen-eyed at spotting vacant chargers. My priority is now getting to the socket rather than parking anywhere near the shop or takeaway the rest of the family thought we were going to. Even a half-hour charge can add a few miles of zero-emissions running. Ditto at home. Only dropping in for a cup of tea between errands? It’s still worth plugging in. I might be telling a different story if this were the V60 estate, which has 1050 litres more boot space, so I’d be making fewer trips to the shops, and therefore not topping up so often.
By Colin Overland
Logbook: Volvo S60 T8 Polestar Engineered
Price £51,100 (£57,810 as tested)
Performance 1969cc turbocharged and supercharged inline-four, 11.6kWh battery, PHEV, 400bhp, 4.4sec 0-62mph, 112mph
Efficiency 104.5mpg (official), 34.9mpg (tested), 48g/km CO2
Energy cost 17.8p per mile
Miles this month 1485
Total miles 6392
Month 5 living with a Volvo S60 Polestar Engineered: we still like engines
Driving something that isn’t my S60 has given me a much better appreciation of what my Volvo is, and what’s so good about it.
The other car in question was the Polestar 2, the full-electric five-door from what has become a more or less separate company from Volvo.
Their designs are not unrelated, and they both have nice cabins, but the driving experience is completely different. The Polestar feels a bit remote and muffled, whereas the S60 offers a much more direct connection between driver and road. My saloon feels alive and engaged with the whole driving process, in a way the Polestar doesn’t.
In both cases, the ride quality isn’t great, but you cut the S60 some slack because of its sporting ambitions; there’s a trade-off between comfort and bodyroll.
It’s maybe not fair to diss the Polestar on the basis of one morning’s drive, when I’ve clocked up almost 2000 miles in the last month in the Volvo; perhaps the 2’s charms would reveal themselves on longer acquaintance.
Those miles in the S60 have given me a chance to explore more of its electronic aids, with mixed results. The voice control is particularly mixed – sometimes responding quickly and accurately to my nav inputs or requests for a change of temperature, but other times getting completely the wrong end of the stick.
The adaptive cruise control is easy to set and adjust. Pilot Assist – which does a bit of steering for you – is one of the better systems of this type, smooth and unintrusive. But Curve Speed Assist seems pointless. It slows down for you ahead of sharp bends if it thinks you’ve set the cruise control a bit too high, demonstrating considerably less faith in the S60’s cornering ability than I have.
By Colin Overland
Logbook: Volvo S60 T8 Polestar Engineered
Price £51,100 (£57,810 as tested)
Performance 1969cc turbo- and supercharged four, 11.6kWh battery, 400bhp, 4.4sec 0-62mph, 112mph
Efficiency 104.5mpg (official), 34.2mpg (tested), 48g/km CO2
Energy cost 17.8p per mile
Miles this month 1904
Total miles 4907
Month 4 living with a Volvo S60 T8 Polestar Engineered: working in harmony
My theology’s a little rusty, but I’m pretty sure the general idea is that Volvo drivers go to Heaven. However, after extensive research, I’ve established that some of the rewards for your virtuous behaviour in buying a plug-in hybrid Volvo come in this life.
That is to say, when there’s a decent amount of charge in the battery, and you’re not in Pure mode (strictly for penitents and perverts), and you put your foot down, you get a very satisfying boost from the electric motor, driving the rear wheels, to supplement the petrol engine’s efforts at the front. It’s particularly noticeable out of bends, or getting up to speed on an on-ramp. The whole car starts to feel like everything’s working in harmony.
And – I’ve measured this – you definitely get superior fuel economy from using this hybrid as a hybrid, with a charged battery, even when you give it some beans, than you get from mimsying around slowly with an empty battery. Engaging Battery Hold to save the charge for later is good if you’ll definitely be doing some zero-emissions running later, say picking up from school, but bad for your economy on the way there.
By Colin Overland
Logbook: Volvo S60 T8 Polestar Engineered
Price £51,100 (£57,810 as tested)
Performance 1969cc turbocharged and supercharged-four-cylinder, 11.6kWh battery, 400bhp, 4.4sec 0-62mph, 112mph
Efficiency 104.5mpg (official), 31.9mpg (tested), 48g/km CO2
Energy cost 18.5p per mile
Miles this month 820
Total miles 3003
Month 3 living with a Volvo S60 T8 Polestar Engineered: vital importance
When you realise that your sporty Volvo, complete with yellow seatbelts, has a top speed limited to 112mph, you have to grab an opportunity to find out what this feels like. How much of a big deal is a top speed electronically reduced from wildly illegal to just illegal? Not much, in this case. If you’re in auto mode, you’ll be in top gear (eighth) long before you hit three-figure speeds, with the engine purring along at around 3000rpm. When the limiter cuts in, it takes the gentlest of forms. If you’ve manually held it in a lower gear, putting the engine closer to its 6500rpm redline, the limiter is more sudden, but nothing alarming. You’re welcome.
By Colin Overland
Logbook: Volvo S60 T8 Polestar Engineered
Price £51,100 (£57,810 as tested)
Performance 1969cc turbo- and supercharged four-cyl, 11.6kWh battery, 400bhp, 4.4sec 0-62mph, 112mph
Efficiency 104.5mpg (official), 41.4mpg (tested), 48g/km CO2
Energy cost 18.5p per mile
Miles this month 1001
Total miles 2183
Month 2 living with a Volvo S60 T8 Polestar Engineered: the joy of flex
How times have changed since I owned a Volvo in the mid ’90s. My 260 GLE – a silver estate with a V6 engine, turbine-blade alloys and suspension made of go-go-dancing jelly babies – was admired by those in the know but reviled by people who liked proper cars. Now, this sleek saloon is admired by all sorts. People don’t know what it is, but they don’t want to punch me, so this is progress.
I’m getting a warm glow from being a Volvo driver these days. My brand loyalties, for a long time located quite some distance south of Gothenburg, seem to have at least booked their ticket for the ferry from Immingham.
This warm glow threatened to go thermonuclear the other day when I was at the Rushden Lakes retail park, and took the opportunity to use one of the free Pod Point chargers. Everything worked just like it was meant to. Plug it in, confirm it on the app, go about my business. Happy day!
And four hours later, a fully charged battery, and the promise of 27 miles of electric driving. Unfortunately, however you deploy it, 27 miles of battery isn’t much. So pretty soon I was once again driving with a charge-free battery.
By Colin Overland
Logbook: Volvo S60 T8 Polestar Engineered
Price £51,100 (£57,810 as tested)
Performance 1969cc turbocharged and supercharged four-cylinder, 11.6kWh battery, 400bhp, 4.4sec 0-62mph, 112mph
Efficiency 104.5mpg (official), 31.0mpg (tested), 48g/km CO2
Energy cost 19.1p per mile
Miles this month 317
Total miles 1182
Month 1 living with a Volvo S60 T8 Polestar Engineered: hello and welcome
Two promises about things I won’t do. First, I won’t go on about the weirdness of this hotted-up Volvo plug-in hybrid wearing a Polestar Engineered badge. Polestar, now a standalone brand and not just a Volvo sub-brand, is heading rapidly to full electric, but in the interim is still slapping its name on products conceived when that narrow mission wasn’t so clear. It just is.
And second, I won’t go on about how tricky it is to make maximum use of a plug-in hybrid’s electric capability in a blame-dodging attempt to explain why I keep driving around with a near-empty battery. Rather, I shall make it my business to make maximum use of the electric capability. (Probably. On a good day. When I can be bothered.)
The extraordinarily long name does a pretty good job of serving as this car’s bio, but there are one or two points I need to expand upon.
Volvo S60. Yes, the saloon, although this current generation is quite swoopy – a bit coupe, a bit muscle car, a lot Polestar 1. But in practical terms yes, four doors and a boot, so it’s a proper saloon.
Recharge. That’s a badge they’re bunging on anything with a plug – BEVs and plug-in hybrids alike. Bearing in mind that Volvo wants half its sales to be fully electric by 2025, they might want to order quite a lot of these badges.
Plug-in Hybrid. There’s a charging socket on the left, feeding an 11.6kW battery located centrally in the transmission tunnel, in turn powering an 87bhp electric motor that drives the rear wheels. There’s still room for a 60-litre petrol tank and a 391-litre boot; front-drive S60s have a 427-litre boot. Quickest empty-to-full charging time is three hours; slowest is eight hours using a three-pin plug at home. I shall be exploring this over the coming months, with a phone full of charging-company apps and maybe – who knows? – the odd trip to the office chargers.
T8. The T is twin motor, the 8 signifies nothing in particular, just that it’s more potent than the T6.
AWD. Yes, all-wheel drive, which is available only with the twin-motor versions of the S60.
Polestar Engineered. If you’re feeling glib, you’ll say that Polestar Engineered means yellow seatbelts and brake calipers, fancy adjustable suspension that nobody will ever bother to adjust (hang on… feels like I should make that a third promise) and a bigger price tag.
There’s a bit more to it than that: serious stuff including Öhlins shocks with Polestar Engineered’s own springs, six-piston Brembo brakes and lightweight 19in wheels, retuned transmission, a different grille, and a high level of interior trim – aluminium and leather, chiefly, rather than any of the innovative vegan/recycled materials featured in the XC40. There are also Polestar Engineered versions of the V60 and XC60, taking a similar approach.
Our test car clocks in at £57,810. That’s £6710 of extras on top of the regular Polestar Engineered S60, although the S60 range starts at just under £40k, if what you want is a modern Volvo saloon.
No point in having the Polestar Engineered version if I’m not going to see what that chassis will do, and no point in having a plug-in hybrid if I’m not going to plug it in and find out how frugal it can be: whether it will really do the claimed 27 miles of electric-only running, whether the combination of petrol four and electric motor provides seriously quick acceleration, whether the all-wheel drive elevates the handling, and just how close I can get to the official fuel consumption figure (involving extensive and wise charger deployment) of 104.5mpg.
Spec details of our S60 Polestar Engineered
The extra safety kit
This car is fitted with the £1600 Driver Assist Pack. That includes autodimming on the interior and exterior mirrors; Intellisafe Surround (which involves Blind Spot Information System, Steer Assist Cross Traffic Alert, Autobrake, Rear Collision Mitigation); Pilot Assist; and Adaptive Cruise Control.
Seriously, these are extras?
Yep, £50 for a seven-metre Type 2 cable; £685 for metallic paint.
The fun stuff
The £1675 Tech Pack includes a Bowers and Wilkins audio upgrade. The Lounge Pack, for £1700, features a 360º parking camera and powered panoramic sunroof. The £325 Climate Pack heats the outer rear seats and throws in a head-up display. The Power Seat option gives the front passenger parity with the driver, by providing power and memory to their seat for £400.
By Colin Overland
Logbook: Volvo S60 Recharge T8 AWD Polestar Engineered
Price £51,100 (£57,810 as tested)
Performance 1969cc turbocharged and supercharged four-cylinder, 11.6kWh battery, 400bhp, 4.4sec 0-62mph, 112mph
Efficiency 104.5mpg (official), 28.6mpg (tested), 48g/km CO2
Energy cost 20.7p per mile
Miles this month 356
Total miles 865