Volvo ES90: If you want the world's finest interiors for less than £100,000, ask the Swedes
There are cars you want to drive, and there are cars you want to be driven in. The ES90 is that car.
Kiwi is a very overweight seagull who visits the cliff-side restaurant of the Maybourne Riviera Hotel every day. As you sit and enjoy a drink, overlooking Monaco and the Mediterranean Sea, Kiwi stares back, yearning for something, anything, to fall into his beak. He then leaves, circling gracefully as only birds can, while the buzz of European life and money and blue sea swirls underneath him. I was jealous of him, of the ease with which he carried on with his life on this azure coastline.
I’m in Monaco to drive a Volvo. Specifically, to drive the ES90, the latest electric saloon from our friends in Gothenburg. Volvo makes two kinds of cars; estates and SUVs for the school run and beyond, and sleek looking saloons for the architects among us.
That Volvo is still making saloon cars is a comforting thought, and a welcome one in a world where everything is slowly growing upwards and outwards and seems to be aimed at getting muddy. There is nothing wrong with a normal car that comes with four doors for five people and has room in the back for some luggage, with no pretences that it can drive up a muddy hill or through a river. Even better if it’s luxurious and electric.
On the road: Volvo ES90
Price: From £69,695 (single motor); From £83,295 (dual motor)
0-62mph: 6.6 seconds (single motor)
Range: 400+ miles (depending on model)
Top speed: 112mph
Charging time 10%-80%: 22 minutes
Aesthetically, there is much to love about the ES90. It has a commanding presence and an air of self importance that is typical of this Swedish brand, and the continuing use of the ‘Thor’s Hammer’ headlights and that sleek front end give the whole machine a lacquer of Modernist sophistication. The mask only slips slightly when you lay eyes upon the Lidar sensor perched upon the roof, reminiscent of a London Black Cab, but surely it will not be long until the boffins from Gothenburg figure out a way to incorporate it into the windscreen/roof.
Inside, the Scandinavian sense of style really asserts itself, with plush (and environmentally friendly) materials on every surface, gravity-defying spaces and structures and consoles, and a vast central touch-screen that could cope with the largest of fingers. It is quite impressive how it is all laid out, in a way that makes you feel like nothing is there when in fact everything is, and more. In a modern car that is bursting with technology, it takes serious skill to stash it all away so cleverly, and it is a welcome return to elegance and ambience that many motoring interior designers seem to have forgotten in a decades long ‘tech race’.
What elevates the space from great to exceptional, however, is the soundsystem. The ES90 makes great use of the fact that it is so quiet by delivering concert-hall levels of audio joy through 25 Bowers & Wilkins speakers, which Volvo have delivered with some help from Abbey Road studios. As you inevitably drive to and from your corner office at Foster + Partners from your Passivhaus in the Home Counties, you can bask in every note, every detail, every crisp key change, like some kind of polo-necked Rick Rubin. Getting spectacularly lost around the streets of Nice, like I did, would have been quite stressful in almost any other car, but in the ES90 it was just an excuse to extend the performance.
To drive, the car is unexciting, which is correct. The seating position is high (because the car is) and the view out of the rear window is basically non-existent due to it being a sportback shape, rather than a more traditional saloon (pros: much more boot space, cons: can’t really see). Perhaps Volvo should have taken a leaf out of the Polestar manual and sacked it off altogether and replaced it with a camera, but with the controversy surrounding that decision, it’s easy to see why Volvo may have decided not to.
It is, like most EVs, diabolically fast considering that it A) weighs over two tonnes and B) is a Volvo, and the steering is on the ‘wafty’ end of the scale. There is not a lot of pleasure to be gained from ‘driving’ the car, but then that is not what it is for. The suspension is excellent, it turns perfectly well in tight city centres, can dodge an oncoming tram with ease, and in the top of the range dual motor variant, it can do 0–62mph in 4 seconds.
It also might be the first car to have successfully figured out how to make safety tech that feels actually safe. I have written before about the litres of safety technology that has been engineered into the ES90 (would you expect any less from Volvo), but it all comes together in such an unintrusive way — no sudden jerks of the wheel, or unsolicited and confusing beeps and screeches. It is watching you, and the road, but unless you were about to do something incredibly silly, you would never know. Peace at last.
Peace appears to be a theme. The car can add 180 miles of range in 10-minutes of charging from a 350kW charger, and can charge from 10% to 80% in a smidge over 20 minutes. Combine that with a range in excess of 400 miles, the car is not just comfortable, it’s extremely practical.
There are cars you want to drive, and there are cars that you want to be in. The ES90 is a car I wanted to be in; I wanted to spend time among the soft Swedish furnishings and the soundsystem. I wanted to feel uncluttered and protected. I wanted to imagine a world where I was designing the next big skyscraper or sports stadium, while flicking through the latest larch-cladding catalogue for my carbon-neutral house.
The interior is really that good. It is best in class for its price point (and likely at price points far higher) and when it’s tacked onto a silent EV that drives perfectly well and for more than 400 miles, then what more is there to worry about? Just sit back, enjoy the music and glide gracefully, like an overfed seagull in the South of France.
