Volvo S60 – The S is for Safe
Volvo S60 Review
There are plenty of assumptions you can make about someone after looking at the car they drive, and chances are if you drive a Volvo most people think you’re safe.
Volvo itself is to blame in many ways, as their devotion to function over form in the early days was best summed up by Dudley Moore’s character Emory Leeson in Crazy People: “Volvo – they’re boxy but good”.
Fast forward 20 years and Volvo has shed this image, thanks largely to a healthy investment in designers who realised that curves and cars were not mutually exclusive.
The new S60 is proof of this – it has sleek lines and a sparkle in its eye, and if you’re dropping the kids off at school they won’t be mocked for their parent’s choice of car. In fact, they will probably get an approving nod. Or tweet, depending on how kids do it these days.
But while Volvo has lost the boxiness it has done nothing to lose the safety – if anything, it has stepped it up another level.
The S60 includes features such as Pedestrion Detection with Full Auto Brake (which scans the street ahead to brake if a pedestrian steps in front of the car), City Safety (which avoids low speed impacts), Driver Alert Control (which alerts drivers who are tired or distracted), Blind Spot Information System (which detects cars in the blind spots, funnily enough), and Lane Departure Warning (which alerts drivers to lane changes made without the indicator being used).
Added to that are the ‘normal’ safety features such as seat mounted side airbags, pyrotechnic seatbelt pre-tensioners (which sound fantastic, but I’m still not sure exactly what they do and how they could be converted into some sort of Bond-esque device), inflatable curtains and Volvo’s patented whiplash protection system (which the press kit reliably informs me is called WHIPS – great acronym work there by the Volvo boffins).
According to Volvo’s manager of active safety functions, Peter Janevik, the S60 is “the safest Volvo ever”.
So what does that mean when you actually drive it? To be honest, being in a car with so many safety features was slightly terrifying.
After enabling every safety feature I could operate without reading the manual, the first hour of driving was entirely disconcerting. It reminded me of driving with a very nervous mother on my L-plates, which from what I remember consisted of me driving and her pointing out every conceivable hazard – real and potential.
Just imagine, you’re cruising along the freeway at 100km/h with not a car in sight, when all of a sudden the heads up display glows red and the car slows itself automatically. Why did it do it? What did this all-knowing car sense that I didn’t see? Was there something in my blindspot? Was there a pedestrian somewhere that I didn’t know about?
It wasn’t just normal driving that had me worried. When I reversed almost anywhere the sensors went crazy, highlighting all sorts of flashing dangers on the reversing camera screen. From what I could tell the car would only be happy letting me reverse in the middle of a football field – provided, of course, there was no pedestrians and I didn’t go over a line without indicating first.
OK, so that last bit may have been an exaggeration, but you get my point. It’s kind of nice driving around without the constant reminder that what you are doing could get you killed at any moment, and once you turn the sensors off the S60 lets you do just that in style.
The comfort features are excellent – details like heated seats and keyless start are the tip of the iceberg – and the car drives brilliantly. It packs a punch when you floor it and it grips the road well, staying low enough in the corners to make you feel like you are in full control.
And that, ultimately, is the point of a car like this. It has equal parts style and functionality and it’s safe as hell. Maybe a bit too safe – but that probably says more about me than the car.
No pedestrians were hit in the testing of this vehicle. There were a few lane changes without indicating, though.
