The biggest car news and reviews, no BS. Some car companies have frozen in their tracks and suspended EV programs, but Volvo isn’t one of them—its radical plan to go electric remains on target. There will be more hybrids to smooth the transition, but excellent new electric vehicles like the 2027 Volvo EX60 remain the core of its plan.
The new electric crossover skips some of the nonsensical spiffs of some electric competition. It’s simply a tasteful, assured, zero-emission companion to the carbon-ated XC60. On sale as a rear-drive P6 or an all-wheel-drive P10, the EX60 offers a smartly sized interior, about 300 miles of range, and a price starting around $60,000. My daylong drive in both models confirms it’s an instant rival for the BMW iX3, an EV SUV I like very much.
View Price on AmazonFrom Gaudí’s architecture to the sail-shaped W Hotel, Barcelona loves good design. Dress sharply if you want to get lots of looks, in other words. The EX60 does that. It doesn’t have the more formal, elegant roof pillars of the XC SUVs, and swaps them for the tapered roofline and banded rear pillar of other global EVs. Its blunt front end pins Volvo’s ironmark to a diagonal tie bar, the side view rises above some sculpted-in abs, and the upturned shoulder line leads into lightning-bolt LED taillights. Inside, the tablet-on-tabletop ethos dominates, with a ribbon of ash trim running behind a square-circle steering wheel. Buttons and switches largely give way to touchscreen-based functions, but a Lucite roller lozenge for volume rests under the screen. It’s hardly useful, but it serves as a subtle grace note on a subdued interior.
I shuttle to the hilly wine country outside of the city, a body-double for Napa, and grab an EX60 P6 first. Wait, where’s the door handle? Rather than break the slipstream with chunky pull-outs, Volvo fairs in slim flags into the window garnish. Squeeze on the inside of that, slip into the supportive front seats, and the EX60 glides off toward some slinky pavement.
The P6 serves as the entry-level model in the EX60 family. Fitted with a single 369-horsepower front motor and an 80 kWh (usable) battery, this EX60 puts out 354 lb-ft of torque. Volvo scores a 0-60 mph time of 5.7 seconds and promises a top speed of 112 mph.
As its first vehicle from a new SPA3 architecture, the EX60 has megacast body sections for a stronger and lighter structure, and a cell-to-body pack design so the battery weighs 20 percent less and charges 31 percent more quickly—from 10-80 percent in 16 minutes, in fact, at 240 kW in the single-motor model, through a standard NACS charging port. Volvo pegs a range of 307 miles in the most efficient P6 with 20-inch wheels; that falls to 295 miles with 22-inch wheels.
This P6 RWD Ultra wears silver paint and a bright-toned, wool-blend interior with dark ash trim and 22-inch wheels. It’s benign and friendly to drive, calm enough that tapping through its vehicle-setting screens doesn’t yield much meaningful change. The passive dampers on this version get very good tuning for an absorbent ride on polished Spanish roads. It’s helped by a curb weight ranging from 4,663 pounds here to 5,137 pounds on dual-motor models. Steering feels feather-light, but the small squircle steering wheel plays mind tricks and makes it feel more attuned and engaged. The P6 doesn’t offer a sport powertrain setting—and the regeneration in its one-pedal driving mode gets limited by design for smoother deceleration. Set it to creep like a gas engine, and it’s difficult to upset it in any way.
Source: thedrive.com
