The 2019 Volvo S60 Polestar Is a Swedish Sport Sedan

this is a volvo s60 pole star and it is a swedish sport sedan now you may not think of volvo as a company that makes sporty cars but this one is a little different it has all-wheel drive it has 416 horsepower and it has 495 pound-feet of torque it's also turbocharged supercharged and it's a plug-in hybrid needless to say this car is very much worthy of a review and so today i'm going to review it [Music] first a little overview on this car now the s60 has been out for around 20 years now and this is the latest version of it it's been just redesigned for the 2019 model year they sell the s60 in three versions there's the base level t5 with 250 horsepower then there's the t6 with 316 horsepower and then there's the plug-in hybrid t8 with 400 horsepower and then building on the t8 there's this the pole star model from volvo's high performance pole star division it has a little extra power and better brakes and better suspension for a more thrilling volvo experience which sounds cool except you can't get one of these for the 2019 model year volvo only made 20 s60 pole stars for the entire country and they sold out online in less than an hour now for the 2020 model year volvo says they're probably going to make a more reasonable rational production run so it's likely that you'll soon be able to go down to your dealer and pick up one of these and it might be worth a serious look because this car on paper at least is pretty impressive like i mentioned 416 horsepower 495 pound-feet of torque and it has all-wheel drive it'll do 0-60 in four and a half seconds now pricing is unknown because when volvo made their really small production run for 2019 it was only available through volvo's monthly payment subscription service but when they make more of them for 2020 figure the regular t8 starts around 55 56 000 so this will probably be well over 60 thousand dollars with all of its pole star upgrades now more than 60 grand for a volvo is a lot but then this car offers a lot and today i'm going to show you around it first i'm going to take you on a tour of this car and show you all of its interesting quirks and features then i'm going to get it out on the road and drive it and then i'm going to give it a dug score and for more of my thoughts on the s60 polestar click the link below to visit autotrader.com oversteer where i've also rounded up a list of some of the lesser known performance sedans currently listed for sale on autotrader aside from your usual c63 amg's and bmw m3s alright i'm going to start the quirks and features of the s60 on the outside i want to start with the pole star badge now if you're like me you've always loved volvo's pole star high performance brand badge because it was this cool light blue that nobody else was using very distinctive it was a nice little touch whenever you saw one on a car yeah well that's gone now they're using this it's white not sure why they ditch the blue but i will miss it and speaking of colors this car has some weird ones i guess all the other automakers have taken the regular high performance colors like red or gray black carbon fiber so volvo has gone with white and gold this car has a lot of gold accents on it for instance the brake calipers are gold rather large they say pulstar engineered on them if you go inside you will also see that the seat belts are gold which is an unusual color but i guess polestar is taking that as their color to emphasize their sportiness my personal favorite though is on the wheels the valve stems are gold which again that's an odd thing to even change the color of but volvo has to make it a little more distinctive that you have the pole star version and next up we move inside the s60 pole star with the camera perfectly angled so you can see the gold seat belts there are a lot of quirks and features in here i'm going to start with one of my favorite and that would be the engine starter switch unlike a boring button like a lot of automakers have volvo has this cool switch in the middle you just twist it and that starts the engine or the hybrid system in this car and i really like this switch it makes starting the car a lot more exciting and interesting than most cars same goes for the drive mode selector right beneath the engine starter switch if you push it you access the drive modes on your infotainment screen and then you just kind of roll it up or down in order to change the drive mode i really really like those two things in conjunction they make normal buttons and switches a little bit more interesting now speaking of interesting one unusual item with that drive mode selector you can choose between all your typical drive modes sport comfort etc but there's also one for all-wheel drive if you're in like a low traction situation ice you can actually use the drive mode button to engage all-wheel drive permanently and then it stays on and it doesn't just sort of wait until there's slippage in order to engage the all-wheel drive system that's a rare feature in an all-wheel drive car now beyond the starter switch and the drive mode selector the other interesting item in the center console here is the gear lever which is rather odd first off it's crystals made by this company orophorus and you can see on the logo there is a seal do you have a picture of a seal on your shifter no you don't now i like the look and feel of this shifter but i've never really liked the operation of this shifter because it always goes back to the middle position no matter what gear you're in so when you start the car you're in park you pull it down once you're in neutral then it goes back to the middle you pull it again and you're in drive then it goes back to the middle to get it into reverse you push it forward neutral push it forward again for reverse you never really know what gear you're in this is probably my least favorite shifter setup in the entire car industry fortunately there is in the gauge cluster a little guide to letting you know what gear you're in but you pretty much have to use that extra guide in the gauge cluster to find out whether you're in reverse or drive because you absolutely can't tell based on the position and the feel of the shifter almost every other automaker does it better now next up we move on to the center console which is rather unusual in this car because of the location of the batteries sort of in this center tunnel underneath the interior the center console is tremendously small look at how tiny this is it's not deep at all you basically can't put anything in there in fact you could barely fit a phone in here so volvo has thought of an interesting idea at the front of the center console there's a little phone stand you can plug in your phone to the usb port in the center console and then sort of stand it up and still close the center console so your phone has a place to go if you kind of want to put it away somewhere and it will stand in that little area in front of the center console now another item i found in the center console when i was poking around is in this little bag it is a cloth volvo gives you this cloth when you buy a volvo it is intended for you to wipe your infotainment screen and the cloth even has directions on it for how to wipe basically you hold the home button on the infotainment screen for two seconds as the cloth tells you and then the screen goes dark it goes into sort of its cleaning mode you can clean the screen with your cloth without accidentally pressing anything and then you can press the home button to turn it back on and your screen is now clean thanks to your volvo provided cloth other interesting items in this car the seats are very nice very luxurious i love their look i love their trim and if you look closely you will find a little tiny swedish flag that kind of pokes out from the side of the seats which is a nice little volvo touch another nice little volvo touch is over on the driver's door panel you have the power window switches you also have the mirror controls and here's a little volvo easter egg for you if you hold down the left and right mirror control at the exact same time the mirrors will fold in a lot of people have volvos for years they don't know it can do that now next we move on to the buttons in the center control stack although if you look in here you might think what buttons volvo has gone minimalist here they've removed almost all buttons they've got it down to just six total in the center control stack which is a very cool look interestingly all six of those are sort of over on the left on the driver's side on the passenger side you have just blanks including one button that just has a white dash on it that isn't actually a button it doesn't do anything but i guess it's there for symmetry it's kind of odd to see that but anyway so if you look at those buttons you'll think well where are the climate controls that means this is one of those cars where they've integrated the climate controls into the infotainment system now normally i hate that but volvo makes it so easy that's because volvo's screen is rather large and so there's always room for the climate controls to be at the bottom and they're there all the time so anytime you want to change the temperature you just tap the temperature and move it up or down with this little slider incredibly easy if you want to change more than that you just press this little climate controlly thing in the middle and then you can change the rest of the climate controls again very simple even though they've integrated it into the screen it's really really easy to use and just in case you don't want to deal with the screen to change the temperature you can always press this little voice button on the steering wheel and give the car a command here's the one i like to use i'm cold temperature set to 73 degrees now with the climate controls integrated into the infotainment system it also means they've integrated the heated seat controls in there which is normally something i hate but again in this car tremendously easy just tap this little seat icon on the screen and then turn on the heated seats it's just as easy as if there actually was a physical button volvo has done this really really well and speaking of volvo doing this well this infotainment system is one of my very favorite in the entire car industry mostly because it operates just like a smartphone first off it's incredibly responsive to your touch every time you tap the screen move anything anywhere it immediately responds with zero lag it's probably the least laggy infotainment system in the business or it's right up there with the other very best ones but the other thing i like about it is at the very bottom of the screen there is a physical button that's the home button just like a lot of smartphones have you push it and it always goes back to your home screen which makes it easy if you're getting confused whatever just press that and you go right to your familiar home screen really really good setup again i really think this is one of the best and easiest to use infotainment systems in the entire car industry one really interesting item with this infotainment system by the way it doesn't use capacitive touch like your phone and like a lot of other screens because this is volvo from sweden where it's cold and people wear gloves they didn't want to do that so instead it uses infrared there are little infrared lines going around the screen to make sure you're about to touch it and then it responds to your touch which might be one reason why it's just so quick and so if you try it using like a glove or something on your hands it will respond which is better than a lot of other systems that won't i like that now next up a few interesting quirks and features of the infotainment system i went over some of these when i reviewed the volvo xc40 which i'll link in the description below but i'm going to give you a few more some of them are unique to this car for example you can drive this car using just the gasoline engine there's a mode called hold and if you turn that on it will hold the battery charge and it won't use the battery electric motor at all it'll just use the gas motor if for whatever reason you want to preserve your battery for later there's also a feature you can use the infotainment system called charge where it will direct the car specifically to use the gasoline engine to charge the electric motor obviously that uses a little bit more gas but will keep your electric motor and your batteries charged for a lot longer now next up another thing you can do on that screen with the hold and charge icons you can drop the rear headrests there's a little icon you push it and the rear headrests drop instantly now a lot of luxury cars have this but usually it's a button you never see it in a screen and it's kind of odd to press a screen and then have something mechanical happen but that's how it works in the s60 now one other interesting item with that screen where all of those icons are is that you can move around the icons to suit your needs for example if you plan to drop the rear headrests frequently you can move it up to the top in the easiest to reach position now next up moving on to some of the other infotainment quirks and features one is the fact that you can change your sound experience how music plays in here and one of the sound experiences you can choose is the gottenberg concert hall which is the big concert hall in gottenburg sweden where volvo's headquarters is located and it has a picture of the concert hall and if you click the little i it actually explains kind of a history about the concert hall and why it's so important to have your car sound like it which is kind of interesting unfortunately your other sound experience options are far less exciting you can also choose individual stage whatever that means and you can select studio which is where you can kind of aim the sound throughout the car front rear driver passenger etc and next up speaking of the sound system in this car a couple of interesting quirks and features there one is the fact that am radio doesn't exist you have fm you have xm but apparently they had trouble getting am radio and the batteries there was static or interference so they just got rid of it so if you're an am radio fan you probably won't want one of these another cool thing about the infotainment system in the music this one i really like if you go to xm radio you can see it shows a channel list and it shows what song is playing on each individual channel as you scroll through so you can kind of scroll through all the channels and then just decide which one you want to choose not based on the channel but based on which song is playing that is a really cool idea and it's another benefit of volvo's vertical infotainment screen it's a little bit taller so you can have longer lists like that with more information now another interesting quirk of the infotainment system is a feature called record and send which is rather bizarre okay you click on it and then you enter an email address and then there's a little microphone and you can record a message which i have hello doug time to explore your quirks and features now once you've recorded your message you can then send it to that email address that you entered a moment ago you press send and it sends and then in your email inbox you get a voice file with that recorded message in it time to explore your quirks and features so if you're driving along in your s60 and you want to record a message and send it to someone and you don't want to just call them or send them like a voice text you can email them a recorded message straight from your infotainment system which is something i suspect nobody will use now next up we move on to the gauge cluster in this car which is reasonably advanced it's not as configurable as some rivals you can't quite do as much with it but it does have a big map in the middle it's very easy to read and reasonably useful but the best quirk of the gauge cluster is you can pull up a menu that lets you select what the gauge cluster displays on the bottom you have a bunch of different options your fuel economy your instant fuel economy your range that sort of thing but you can also choose something called gph and what exactly is that that would be gallons per hour it will display for you how many gallons of fuel you're using per hour in case you calculate fuel economy that way for whatever possible reason it will show that i've never seen another car that will display your gph now next we move into the back of the s60 pull star and the first thing you notice back here is this big hump in the middle on the floor again this is where battery stuff is located and the result of that is the middle seat passenger in this car is going to be rather uncomfortable because their feet are going to kind of have to straddle this hump rather than just sticking your legs out in front of you definitely a drawback if you actually plan to carry five people frequently in a sedan but surely volvo understands this rather uncomfortable positioning and so they've decided to make up for it with the fact that even the middle seat belt back here is gold not just the outer two belts no no even the middle passenger gets their own gold seat belt so they don't have to feel all that left out now speaking of the middle if you look in the middle you'll notice there are no climate vents but there are climate vents that come to the back seat they're just located on the pillars on either side of the two front seats and you can see that the little switch in the middle says off on it if you move that switch down it will turn off the climate vents if you don't want air to be blown on you as a rear seat passenger now next we move along to the s60s trunk and you will notice over here the white pole star logo not as good as the blue one but that's what they're going with anyway you open up the trunk and you will discover a bag with a little volvo logo on it open the bag and that is this car's charging stuff it is a plug-in hybrid and so this is the stuff you use to actually plug it in and charge up the battery other than that the trunk is fairly normal fairly standard nothing particularly exciting it's just a car trunk but there is one cool feature that comes when you close the trunk now this isn't a power trunk you can't push a button and it closes automatically but it does have a button near the top that you can push so what does that do well it's a lock that activates once the trunk is closed so you push that button you get your briefcase or your luggage out you close the trunk and then all of the doors are locked and you can walk away without having to go back up to a door and lock it or use the key fob you just press that button first and it locks everything that is a smart idea now next up finally we move under the hood and like i mentioned before yes you heard me right this car has four things turbocharged supercharged plug-in hybrid and not something i would want to own out of warranty it seems like there's a lot going on in here i'll maybe take a little time let the technology mature for a little while before i think about buying something like this used but it is an impressive feat to have all of it and the numbers speak for themselves 415 horsepower 495 pound-feet it's pretty strong one interesting thing under the hood here is that the cover on top of the engine isn't plastic instead it's like a foam material volvo told me they do this for pedestrian safety if you hit someone with your car and their head comes down and hits the hood it won't kind of impact the really really hard engine block instead it has this foam surface to kind of bounce off of which makes it a little bit safer and that's kind of a neat idea the other interesting thing under here that i like is this little warning label that warns you not to jump start the car in this position just two little cars with their hood up and a cord connecting them and then a do not sign i just find it to be rather charming and so those are the quirks and features of the volvo s60 pole star now it's time to get it out on the road and see how it drives all right driving the s60 pole star one of the rarest cars on the market although nobody else knows that so i'm in sport mode i've been driving this car for a couple days and the conclusions i've come to are as follows first off it is really quick in a straight line especially in sport mode very responsive very quick um there's a lot of power obviously it has the electric motor as well so there is some of that crazy instant torque you get from an electric motor and in that sense this car is quick it feels fast because it is fast now it's no c63 it's no big v8 whatever but it's quick it's fast and it feels good with that said the drawback is compared to a typical performance sedan the drawback is obviously the dynamics um it's just not quite as good when you're in sport mode the steering feels relatively tight it feels relatively sharp compared to a regular s60 but not compared to like an m3 or a c63 or whatever it's just not like great there's some body roll around corners not much but the real problem is you just have sort of a steering vagueness that you don't get in those cars turn in is a little bit vague and it's just not as satisfying that precision isn't quite there if you're going hard you know on like a canyon road through a lot of twisty stuff it's just not there you feel a little bit more disconnected than you do in a standard you know performance sedan but obviously i think an enormous part of the appeal of this car is that it brings kind of a sporty aspect to you know a volvo so you can have a volvo and have your typical sensibility and it's not as expensive and it has good technology and safety but also you have some sportiness and in that level it this car works brilliantly because it's exactly that instead of looking at it compared to like an m3 look at it compared to a regular volvo you get all the same stuff you get a normal volvo but you also get a little bit more performance a little bit more fun a little more excitement and on on that level it's really cool is it worth 65 70 000 if that's where they're gonna price it tough call sedans in general are dying the new s60 has not been particularly popular neither is volvo's s90 their suvs are white hot the dealers can't stock enough xc40 60s 90s but the sedans are just really slow and it's would be hard for me to justify spending that much money for like the top end of a sedan when you know sedans just aren't there anymore unless you really really want it and i think that's probably part of the reason why volvo only released 20 of these they were like well we can sell 20. can we sell 500 can we sell a thousand might be harder and so that's the volvo s60 pole star now this isn't going to take down the bmw m3 you're the mercedes amg c63 anytime soon it's nowhere near as fast and it isn't on that level dynamically either but it's still cool and it's a good way to get great technology and volvo's sort of subtle under the radar brand name and luxury and still have some fun behind the wheel and now it's time to give this car a dug score starting with the weekend categories and styling the s60 is handsome nice looking for a sedan and it gets a six out of 10. acceleration does 0 to 60 in 4.3 seconds and it gets a 7 out of 10. handling is ok not amazing but better than the volvo norm and it gets a 5 out of 10. fun factor is average after a few fast acceleration runs there's not that much excitement left and it gets a 4 out of 10. cool factor is also low it may be the rare pulstar model but most people just see it as a volvo sedan and it gets a 4 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 26 out of 50. next up are the daily categories and features this car is loaded with a lot of tech and it stops just short of some of the very best and it gets an 8 out of 10. comfort is normal for the class and it gets a 7 out of 10. quality is excellent with good materials though i do worry about long-term reliability still it gets a 7 out of 10. practicality is normal for the class and it gets a 5 out of 10. finally value and this is hard without knowing exact pricing but given my assumptions of around 65 000 this is pricey and it's a little hard to justify over a lot of good rivals it gets a 5 out of 10 for a total daily score of 32 out of 50. added up and the doug score is 58 out of 100 which places it here in this very competitive segment i prefer the bmw m340i and the tesla model 3 though the s60 pulstar holds its own against a few very popular rivals it's a good effort [Music]

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 1,750,333

Keywords: volvo s60, s60 polestar, volvo s60 review, s60 review, s60 polestar review, volvo s60 polestar review, new volvo s60, 2019 volvo s60, 2020 volvo s60, polestar review

Id: KVQzEKHI2Tw

Length: 24min 15sec (1455 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 16 2019