The Big Deal

Volvo’s most popular product, of all, is the XC60. Here’s the new one!

- Shubhabrata Marmar

The Volvo XC60 is a massively important car for the Swedish car company. It represents nearly a third of all Volvos sold. And, as the company is happy to remind you constantly, the XC60 ‘became Europe’s largest-selling SUV in its segment within seven years of its launch. So you can be sure that the Volvo XC60, an SUV that is similar in size to the BMW X3, the Audi Q5 and the Mercedes-Benz GLC, has been carefully designed to further what is already a success story for Volvo and to take it to the next step.

The Volvo’s new-generation product was revealed at the Geneva Motor Show earlier this year and we’ve just driven it. More to the fore, the Volvo XC60 is expected to go on sale in India towards the end of 2017 at a price around `55-60 lakh. Even at the outset you might think that sounds like quite the price jump – the current Volvo XC60 is `48-52 lakh. Well, let’s reserve judgement and look at the Volvo XC60 in detail first, shall we?

THE SPA PLATFORM

Like all the new Volvos, the XC60 is also based on the SPA, or scalable platform architecture. Volvo’s SPA is a really simple idea in the sense that the chassis platform has a fixed front axle to the dashboard distance, but the rest of the elements are movable, allowing Volvo to create vehicles of different sizes and roles easily.

To wit, the XC60’s design pushes the wheels to the shortest overhangs yet – but the forthcoming V60 will have shorter overhangs still, says Volvo. But at the same time, the fixed part of the frame allows a lot of the same good qualities as the XC90 to manifest in the XC60 as well.

Volvo also upped the use of high strength steels to lower the weight of the XC60, and 235PS D5 to D5, the XC90 D5 and the XC60 have the same engines but the smaller SUV is 200kg lighter.

ENGINES