God knows why a young person would look at my farming show and think, “Mmm, that’s what I want to do for a living.” Sure, it’s fun to whizz about at harvest time, playing with heavy machinery and drinking cider in the late summer sunshine. But for the other 50 weeks of the year it’s mostly a smorgasbord of mud, pain and sadness, and it’s all topped off with a pay packet that would disappoint a Congolese miner.
Nevertheless, I regularly receive missives from teenagers asking for a job and they all have one thing in common. They haven’t learnt how to drive.
So how are they going to get to the farm when it’s 3am and a pig is dying? Or it’s 10pm and we’ve just decided to plough one more field before calling it a day? There are buses, sure. I saw one in November, and I’m told another came in February but I can’t confirm that. Some might argue that they could come on a bicycle, but we don’t employ that sort of person here.
It’s the same story in the world of television. You employ someone as a runner and they arrive with a first in astrophysics and an ability to converse fluently in German, Polish and Chinese. Plus they’re willing as hell and fun to have around. But they can’t drive.
So what’s happened? Well, I know that today’s young people see the car as an unnecessary expense, and in London that’s almost certainly true. But London’s doomed. In a few years it’ll just be a seething mass of people in high-visibility jackets waiting their turn to make chanting noises about whatever issue is affecting their mental health that day. I suppose people will always be needed to clear fatbergs from the sewers, but soon all the fun jobs will be in the sticks. Where you need a car.
Which, of course, is a “bad thing”. Drive one and there’ll be a whiff of the far right about you – a sense that you’re a climate change denier and that you possibly haven’t burnt your Harry Potter books yet. As is required in paragraph four of the laws governing acceptance on social media.
Certainly I know of no young person who thinks a car might be “fun”. Or that speed is exciting. Or that the noise of a V8 really does do chemical things to one’s limbic system. Nor do they see a car as a symbol of freedom. They see it as a tool. And, worse, a tool they can do without. I find myself wondering if, in middle-class circles, the Volvo XC90 should take a share of the blame for this.
When I was being driven to school, we just went in whatever car our dad had. The idea that he’d choose something specifically for that role was preposterous. One kid at our school was dropped off in his dad’s Maserati Ghibli. And even though they managed to get his trunk in the back, I’m fairly sure that wasn’t the reason he bought it.
Then, early in 1983, we were told we must all wear seatbelts. At a stroke that meant kids couldn’t be squeezed into the back of a car like Spam. They each needed their own seats. And the very next year along came the seven-seater Renault Grand Espace, which answered that problem.
All of a sudden people began to choose their next car based not on how fast it went or how cool it was, but whether little Johnny would be comfy on long journeys and safe in a crash. Soon there were hundreds of people carriers and they were all terrible, until 2002, when Volvo introduced us to the XC90.
This was different somehow. It didn’t look like a box. It didn’t feel mumsy. It may have been designed for the school run but it had a He-Man stance. You could almost convince yourself it was a Swedish Range Rover. But it wasn’t. It was a school-run box. A blody clever one with actual space for seven humans and their dogs, and all wrapped up in a skin as impregnable as a submarine base.
This, then, was a car you bought with your head. I know this because I’ve had two. And they were tremendous. But consider what our kids thought as they were ferried to and from school in the back. I’m not sure it will have given them the same tingles as my mate’s dad’s Ghibli.
There’s a new XC90 now. Not that you’d know by looking at it. It looks pretty much the same as all the others, not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s a handsome car. And I love how it says “AWD” (all-wheel drive) on the back. Volvo always likes to pick on one feature and put it on the boot lid. They used to have little badges saying “5 speed”. And the 340 had one saying “lambda probe”.
There are three trim levels and a choice of three engines. The base model is a turbocharged 2.0-litre, which sounds pretty boring, and the top model gets some kind of hybrid system, which sounds unnecessary and expensive. So I tested the middle-order B6, which uses every possible means to extract as much as is possible from every atom of fuel. It has a turbocharger, a supercharger and 48 volts, and it works very well.
The trim level fitted to my car was called Ultimate, which means it came with 21-inch wheels. Often this can spoil the comfort, but I also had air suspension, so it didn’t. Size? Well, it’s big, but less intimidating to drive round a city than a Range Rover. And it’s surprisingly light. The best thing, though, if you ignore the relentless common sense, is the interior. Pale and smooth and zincy, the dash is fronted by the sort of wood normally used to make Kevin McCloud’s spectacle frames. And you get a vertical satnav screen, which in north-south countries such as the UK, and Chile, and Sweden for that matter, makes more sense than the usual wide-screen systems. Which are better suited to east-west countries such as America.
I spent a long time trying to find anything annoying or substandard and I just couldn’t. Apart from the relentless bonging, obviously, but that’s a government requirement these days. It was a nice place to sit. It was comfortable, and while I did raise an eyebrow at how the top speed has been limited to just 180km/h, we rarely need to go faster than that on a school run.
So yes, while it’s likely that the XC90 has poisoned the next generation’s mind into believing that cars should be sensible, I have to admit that if that’s the way they’ve got to be now, the latest incarnation is absolutely spot on.
VOLVO XC90
ENGINE: 2.0-litre, four-cylinder petrol, turbo and supercharged
PERFORMANCE: 0-100km/h 6.7 seconds, top speed 180km/h
PRICE: From $100, 990
JEREMY’S RATING: ★★★★
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