Welcome back, Volvo V60: This excellent estate has plenty of life left

Some of those facets are a problem when it comes to fuel efficiency. The heavier a car is, the more metal it has to drag around and the more fuel it burns; the bigger a car’s frontal area, the more drag it creates and the more fuel it burns.

But in a combustion car this just costs money, and for a proportion of the population, and for quite a lot of those who buy new cars, that’s a bit of a bind but not a deal-breaker.

If a vehicle is pure-electric, the effects can be worse: as well as costing money, weight and aerodynamics also cost time, because it affects a vehicle’s range. And that is a problem. You can save weight, but that's difficult because batteries are heavy, fancy materials are expensive and, quite honestly, a few kilos here and there doesn’t actually improve EV efficiency all that much.

No, to get more efficiency from an electric car, you have to improve aerodynamics – and the best way to do that is to make a car’s frontal area smaller. 

Back in 2023, Citroën’s former CEO Vincent Cobée talked about electrification preparing us for a “post-SUV world”. The trend isn’t here yet, but perhaps it’s coming. Or perhaps it already is here, but because we’re calling the Toyota Aygo X an SUV we haven’t noticed it yet.

Volvo has certainly noticed something. In 2023, it had no qualms about ditching the car no matter how much we all thought it was a part of the furniture; but come late 2024, there was sufficient residual interest in the traditional Swedish wagon that it decided to reintroduce the V60 and V90 estates.

Given the reintroduction, this feels like a new car – only it isn’t really. The V60 has been in its second generation since 2018, not that it is any the worse for that. We’ve become accustomed to brand-new cars not actually making life much better than their immediate predecessors managed to do, so the V60 sits in a pleasing sweet spot where it retains proper buttons and dials for the lights, volume controls and so on: the traffic sign monitor on/off switch is a single push of a steering wheel button.

Throw in big Volvo seats, steering wheel and seat heating and incredibly clear dials with highly legible uncomplicated fonts and it’s like picking up a new pair of shoes that are identical to a beloved old pair: newly smart but immediately comforting.

The V60 is what we would once have called a compact executive estate: it is 4.76m long and 1.92m wide across the body, and it has one of the biggest boots in the class, with a load length of 1.02m with the rear seats in place, rising to 1.85m with the back seats folded.

There is 529 litres of space behind the rear seats, or up to 1441 litres overall. And all that with room for a spacesaver spare wheel beneath the boot floor. There’s also a divider on the boot floor with some straps to secure loads behind it, a multitude of hooks and a load-dividing net that folds up so neatly you can almost overlook that it is a £90 optional extra.

Volvo binned the diesel engine some time ago, with V60s now being offered either as B4 petrols, like this one, which is a range-topping £48,070 Ultra, or T6 plug-in hybrids. The reintroduced V90 comes as a plug-in hybrid only.

So the engine here is a mildly hybridised built for mooching but really quite lithe by today’s standards 2.0-litre inline four making 197bhp and 221lb ft, driving through a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic gearbox (rather than the eight-speed torque-converter auto of earlier diesels, as our 2018 road test V60 was). 

There are still no steering wheel paddles, though, and although the gears are occasionally hesitant to really get going from a standstill, that’s something I really don’t mind: it would seem odd to have flappy paddles in a car as moochy as this: as soon as you’re moving along the engine fades to inaudibility.

Rolling comfort is good given that the V60 runs on 235/40 R19 tyres, which are the only option, as far as I can tell, and while Volvos have never been the sportiest cars in their classes (and they’re all the better for it), in a world of two-plus-tonne wagons, driving something that’s 1.44m tall and which weighs 1734kg brings with it a sense of lightness and agility, relatively speaking: it’s almost 700kg lighter than the BMW i5, for instance.

It’s half a tonne lighter than a Hyundai Ioniq 5 N, too. This stuff, ultimately, matters. The mild hybridisation means I managed as near as darnit 40mpg, which isn’t a figure that gets people sending postcards home these days, but it’s as good a number as we got from our diesel road test V60 back in 2018.