Ice Capades

Dancing with Volvo’s latest lifted wagon on a slushy Swedish lake.

- Todd Lassa

It seems as though climate change has come to this ski resort some 380 miles north of Stockholm as the SAS plane flies. The puddle of water on top of frozen Lake Ånnsjön gets deeper as the morning goes on. But it doesn’t slow us down as we slalom the new Volvo V90 Cross Country around a couple of tasty but slushy rallyesque lake circuits.

“What do you think the purpose of this is?” my drive partner asks.

“Not a damn thing,” I reply. And that is good. Safe and stolid Volvo, now in its seventh year out from under Ford Motor Co.’s thumb, has brought us to this fairly remote area of its homeland in order to develop some positive—the company hopes— impressions of the 2017 V90 Cross Country T6. The only real-worldish on-road drive is the 90 minutes each way to and from the airport, which happens on slushy snow- and ice-covered pavement.

The V90 Cross Country comes with standard laminated side windows and a panoramic sunroof, and if the idea is that such glass will mitigate noisy studded winter tires, it works. Wheel sizes offered in the U.S. will be standard 19s or an optional 20-inch setup. The car we’re driving features the 19-inchers wrapped with studded Nokians. They fill the wheel wells so well we’d suggest staying with the smaller wheel/tire setup that by extension offers less unsprung weight.

None of these roads tells us much about the car’s handling. There’s nary a decent on- or off-ramp. If that concerns you and your hopes for a complete car magazine review, you’re missing the point. Volvo’s SPA large-car platform is sized at and priced just a bit below the midsize Mercedes-Benz E- and GLE-Classes or, perhaps more appropriately, the Audi A6/Q7.