RS Road Test: Volvo EX90

The advent of the electric age is going to suit some car manufacturers more than others. If your stock-in-trade is hairy-chested V8 sports cars shouting down a straight exhaust pipe in the fashion of Keith Richards clearing the lungs after a big night out, then silent running and zero emissions may not speak to your brand values.

But, if you hail from libertarian Scandinavia, where clean, minimalist design is less a national trait and more a way to pass the time, and you can see around you the impact of climate change upon the natural order from a front row seat, then your corporate raison d’etre might very well feature light-touch co-existence with your surroundings and a quest for serenity.

So it is, then, for Volvo and its all-new EX90 flagship SUV — a state-of-the-art manifestation of all you’d expect from the Swedish carmaker’s playbook that is at once comforting and familiar and awash with 21st-century automotive tech. And there’s much to like.

First off, though a bespoke (rather than adapted) platform created for electric propulsion from the ground up, what’s wrapped around it is reassuringly Volvo. A square-edged silhouette, albeit with some smoothing at the corners, and trick, bejewelled lighting front and back, speaks to bluff outlines forged over decades that suggest this is a strong, robust and practical space in which to house up to seven humans of varying sizes. Although a kid with a crayon could outline the profile of the EX90, that takes nothing away from a shape that’s pleasing on the eye and inescapably modern.

Same schtick inside, too — the cabin is cleaner than any whistle or new pin, stripped of fussiness and (bang on trend) with all manner of switchgear swept away into a single, expansive touchscreen. To the detriment of some basic functionality, perhaps, but goodness me it’s easy on the eye. All about are uninterrupted surfaces, beautifully finished, enrobed or inlaid with materials that are indisputably first class. In lighter shades, dappled by sunshine as we sweep through the canyons of our Californian test route, it’s simply a fabulous place from which to watch the world go by.

Aided, I’d have to say, by a level of refinement that it took Rolls-Royce a century to perfect when powered by an internal combustion engine. Yes, it’s that insulated from the inside looking out: we are all but at the “all you can hear is the clock” maxim, save for the fact the clock is digital and there’s just the faint hum of the air conditioning delivering up chilled air to offset the 40-degree temperatures outside. 

Still, all the better to hear you with. It’s said that nature abhors a vacuum, and if there’s silence within, then let Bowers and Wilkins fill it — the EX90 carries the most extraordinary sound system up to and including the installation of speakers in the headrests. The clarity and purity of delivery is studio standard, as though the music hangs within the air around you, and the richness of tone means the latter stages of our route north on PCH1, shining sea away to our left, felt a little like living through a series of movie credits. Outstanding.

Volvo’s flagship is quick, too — the twin-motor, top-end Ultra spec cars at launch will hit 60mph from standstill in sub-five seconds, but more relevant is how the mass of a 2.7-tonne SUV is managed at pace to feel — in soft suspension and steering mode — comfortable, compliant and unhurried. Switch from soft to firm settings, though, and everything stiffens to the detriment of all of those things, so best not: left to its own devices, the car’s swift, relaxed progress in an ambient space is a recurring theme.

There’s still some work in progress — the car’s immense super-computer manages this wealth of mobile tech, but while the hardware is said to be future-proofed, there is a raft of over-the-air updates coming that will improve the software that glitched a little here and there on these pilot-build cars, none of which could run Apple CarPlay, for example. But that will settle sooner rather than later.

The enduring impression, however, is that Volvo’s EX90 is an EV flagship to both admire and desire. It’s quick, quiet and extraordinarily refined but still, inexorably, blessed with Scandi cool.