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Volvo raises its pretty wagon’s profile.
Raising a station wagon on its suspension for longer wheel travel and giving it some rugged-looking fender extensions, sill protectors, and skid plates might not seem like a big deal, but look what it did for the Subaru Outback and the Audi Allroad. Volvo first did the trick way back in 1997 with its V70 Cross Country wagon, and now the company is applying the formula to the pretty V60 wagon.
The V60 Cross Country unveiled at the 2014 Los Angeles auto show should not be confused with Volvo’s range of XC crossovers, whose XC badging stands for “cross country” and which tilt toward the SUV end of the scale. The V60 Cross Country rides 2.6 inches higher than does the normal V60, which can even be ordered with the same all-wheel-drive system minus the added ground clearance. The Cross Country also gets specific 18- and 19-inch wheel designs wearing taller-profile tires for better ride quality, hill-descent control for off-road credibility, and standard navigation. Appearance upgrades include black leather seats with brown stitching (with two-tone leather options promised to follow), a honeycomb grille insert, black mirror housings, and your usual stinkin’ badges.
This new Cross Country will square up more evenly against the Allroad and the BMW 328i xDrive wagon when it arrives in the first quarter of 2015—as what Volvo is calling a 2015.5 model—with a 250-hp turbocharged five-cylinder engine, all-wheel drive, and a starting price of $41,925. That’s almost $9000 less expensive than the high-performance V60 T6 AWD R-Design that placed third behind the Audi and the BMW in a recent comparison test, in part because it was the most expensive car of the group.
The United States and Canada will be the first markets to get this Cross Country, a neat reversal of priorities, since Volvo started selling the V60 elsewhere for 2011 but couldn’t be bothered sending it to North America until 2014. Volvo projects combined EPA fuel economy for this model at 23 mpg. (World markets will also get the tall V60 with the Drive-E turbo four-cylinder and front-wheel drive.) Volvo has an eight-speed automatic in its parts bin, but this V60 will come with the older six-speed automatic, which is tough enough to serve in the racy (and rare) V60 Polestar. We might rather drive that version, but Volvo is counting on the V60 Cross Country and the all-new XC90 also shown in L.A. as major elements of the brand’s thrust to expand its U.S. sales volume, which has been declining for a decade.
Volvo’s stateside sales rate of late is about 60,000 units a year, but Håkan Samuelsson, president and chief executive, says the aim is to get back up to 100,000 in the medium term. “We sold over 100,000 cars a year in the U.S. in the past,” he said. “Our initial aim is to get back to that level and in the longer term surpass it.”
A set of wheels like the V60 Cross Country seems like a good—although probably fairly small—step toward achieving that goal.
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