Volvo XC90: Range Rover rival fast as a Ferrari 348 and fuel miser too

The new XC90 is still a Volvo and it’s still practical and sensible. But, oh my God, it’s a nice place to sit.

Volvo’s XC90 has the same huge body. But this one is Ferrari fast and can do 2.1 litres per 100km.

The Range Rover is an excellent car; fast, luxurious, well made and capable of bumping smoothly over a grouse moor. It’s so excellent in fact that soon after you take delivery, it will be stolen.

The problem has reached such epidemic proportions that whenever the police in London are not investigating former MPs and army officers for no reason at all, they are apparently under orders to pull over every Range Rover they see. Because chances are the man at the wheel is on his way to Albania.

I suspect this would take the sheen off the ownership experience; coming out in the morning to find your car isn’t there. Or finding it is there and being pulled over every 100m by a policeman who will assume you are rich and that therefore you must at some point have done some inappropriate touching.

So if you are not going to buy a Range Rover, what other choices do you have? Well, only one, I’m afraid, the new Volvo XC90. And now your shoulders have sagged and you are thinking that if that’s the only other option, you may as well commit suicide.

I get that. As a small boy you didn’t lie in bed at night dreaming of the day you could own a Volvo. It’s something you buy for practical reasons, like a pair of gardening gloves. It’s what you do when you are old and everything stops working down there. It’s just somewhere to sit while you wait for the Grim Reaper to pop in and say: “Ready?”

The old XC90 was a little different and in some ways even worse because this was a car you bought because it was a safe and practical space for your children. Which meant that it was always bought with just a hint of resentment. You weren’t old enough for a Volvo. You still had fire in your loins. You could still ski and scuba dive, and at parties women still found you attractive. But you had to have a Volvo because you needed seven seats for your kids.

The new XC90, however, is different. Yes, it’s still a Volvo and it’s still the most practical and sensible seven-seater of them all. But, oh my god, it’s a nice place to sit. It feels like you’re lounging around in one of those Scandinavian furniture shops where everything is beautiful and pale and a chair costs £2500.

There’s a diamond-cut starter button and a crystal glass gearlever and detailing on the dials that makes the detailing on an IWC watch look like something you’d find on a proud parent’s fridge door. The central command screen is like an iPad and the roof is glass and it’s protected by a cool and crisp electric sunshade made from what looks like white calico.

Every other car in the world feels like the inside of a German’s wash bag. They’re all a symphony of dark greys with red detailing. The Volvo is not like that at all. It’s better. This side of a Rolls-Royce Phantom, it’s the nicest interior anywhere. And unlike a Danish chair, it’s not that expensive. The entry-level all-wheel drive diesel starts at less than £47,000. So that’s that then. Or is it?

Because the new version of the XC90 has the same enormous body and the same spacious and wonderful interior. But this one, says Volvo, can do 2.1 litres per 100km. That’s not a misprint. It is actually claiming that this car, which is almost 5m long and weighs 2.3 tonnes, can travel from London to Nottingham on less than 3.75 litres of petrol. That’s not a misprint either. Petrol. Not diesel.

Oh, and just in case you are thinking that it must be fitted with the sort of engine that you’d normally expect to find in a tin opener, consider this: 0-100km/h in 5.6 seconds. It’s as fast off the line, therefore, as a Ferrari 348. So what we have here is a large and sensible seven-seater, with an excellent Scandi interior, that can keep up with a Ferrari but use 2.1 litres per 100km. Drooling yet?

Well, obviously, there are a few things I need to point out before you rush off to the dealer. First, you’ll never manage that fuel figure in real life. And certainly not if you do 0-100km/h in 5.6 seconds. Oh, and the car I tested, which had a few extras fitted, costs more than £75,000.

The design is called the T8 Twin Engine, and I like that. Most car companies use the term “hybrid”, which is another word for “mongrel”, but Volvo has been honest and told us what’s what.

The car has two engines. There’s a 235kW turbocharged and supercharged 2.0-litre four-cylinder petrol engine at the front that drives the front wheels. At the back, driving the rear wheels, there’s an 65kW electric motor. In between, where you’d expect to find a prop shaft, is where the batteries live.

This car be charged from the mains or by the petrol engine as you drive along. Either way, it is not going to be a vehicle you can service at home. Even if you have the Haynes manual.

There’s a button on the centre console that allows you to choose whether you’d like to use power made at a power station by burning Russian gas, or power made by crushed prawns to produce oil. Most of the time I used both.

Volvo says you can travel about 40km on electric power, but I didn’t get that far. I engaged silent drive while in the multistorey car park at Selfridges and I’d only gone down one level before a woman ran out of the shop and right in front of me. She simply hadn’t heard me coming. I decided after that to use the petrol engine as well. Because that’s the thing about petrol, it’s not only brilliant and ecological, but safe too.

Other things? Well, sitting on the optional air suspension the ride was smooth, the stereo was beyond brilliant, the seats were comfortable, the handling was better than I expected and while I didn’t understand all the readouts on the dash, I did enjoy looking at the graphics.

Drawbacks? The petrol engine is not what you’d call refined. It sounds like a diesel. And the gearlever has to be nudged twice before it engages a gear. And the size, I’ll be honest, can be a nuisance. It’d be fine in Houston, which is what Sven and Thor were thinking about when they said to one another: “Let’s make it enormous.” But it can be a bloody nuisance in Britain.

You’d have this issue with a Range Rover, too. So which is best? Well, for refinement and imperiousness, the Range Rover, of course. But in every other way, it has to be the Volvo. Especially the way it will always be where you left it. Because who in their right mind would ever want to steal it?

NEED TO KNOW

VOLVO XC90 T8

Vehicle

Large luxury SUV

Hybrid driveline

2.0-litre supercharged and turbocharged four-cylinder petrol plus electric motor

Outputs

235kW at 5700rpm and 400Nm at 2200rpm (engine), 65kW at 7000rpm and 240Nm at 0rpm (motor)

Transmission

Eight-speed automatic, all-wheel drive

Average fuel economy

2.1 litres per 100km

Price

£64,555 ($122,950 plus on-road costs)

Rating

4 stars