If you long for the good old days when car model numbers referred to the engine capacity, I've got bad news for you: the car industry's product planners are hard at work devising new and arcane naming schemes in an effort to not make EVs sound like inkjet printers. These systems need to be designed, with roughly equal importance, to help customers make sense of batteries and motors on the one hand and to gently upsell them to the more expensive model on the other.
I'm not sure they're succeeding with the former, but they're getting the hang of the latter. I've written in the past about how it's a struggle to make fast EVs truly appealing. When a normal Audi A5 gets a four-cylinder engine and the S5 gets a V6, you know which one you really want. But when the base Q6 EV is silent and already very fast, why would you pay more for an SQ6 that feels broadly the same but has less range?
View Price on AmazonOne possible solution is to subtly downplay the cheaper one and hope nobody notices and just upgrades. If you value order and mathematical regularity, you might have noticed something odd about the line-up of the new Volvo EX60. It goes P6, P10, P12, which begs the question of what happened to the P8. What Volvo has done is give each one a different-sized battery - something it can easily do by filling the pack with more or fewer cells. Notably, the P6's battery is substantially smaller than the P10's.
Because the P6 only has a single motor and is therefore a bit more efficient than the dual-motor P10, the gap in range isn't huge (240 versus 260 miles), but it definitely exists. This hierarchy gives you a neat range walk, in which each version has both more power and range than the one below it. More is better. So buy the spendy one. Simple. BMW has done something similar with the new iX3, giving the single-motor 40 variant a smaller battery than the dual-motor 50.
Manufacturers don't tend to comment on future products unless they're backed into a corner or want to soft-launch something, so there's nothing official, but it's easy to see what a P8 would look like: big battery, and single motor for a range of around 280 miles. It would be the EX60 we'd recommend, but I don't actually think Volvo will build it. I suspect the illogical naming is partly to keep the option open just in case but mainly to give people another reason to pony up the extra $3000 and go for the one that's not just two but four Ps better.
Source: autocar.co.uk
