Volvo’s new S90 is engineered to keep you out of harm’s way.
The Hamptons—specifically, Montauk, N.Y., at the tip of Long Island’s South Fork—was the setting for a late-summer test-drive of the Volvo S90 (volvocars.com), the Swedish brand’s new flagship sedan. It replaces the S80, which had been in production since 1998. The S90 is an elegant vehicle—the test car was painted a gray that the brand calls Mussel Blue Metallic—that blended with the area’s sprawling summer estates and tony beachside resorts.
Safety remains at the forefront of Volvo engineering. The company has set a goal, targeted for the year 2020, of preventing any driver or passenger of a new Volvo from suffering a serious or fatal injury in a crash. To that end, the S90 comes standard with several advanced safety features, including Pilot Assist, which automatically steers the car, accelerates it, and applies the brakes in slower traffic. Two other safety systems are also industry firsts as standard equipment: The large-animal detection feature uses the onboard radar and camera to spot deer, elk, moose, or other four-legged creatures (or pedestrians) and apply the brakes if needed. The road-edge mitigation feature detects when the vehicle is drifting off the side of the road and corrects the steering accordingly.
The S90 has a starting price of $47,000, but the options in the test vehicle, a model with the Inscription trim, raised the price to more than $66,000. They included all-wheel drive for tackling summer showers and the harsh weather that comes to Long Island with the winter months, when clambakes on the beach are a distant memory.
Volvo was once known for its inline-5 engines, but it has gone exclusively to 4-cylinder power plants. The S90 is equipped with a 2-liter inline-4 that is turbocharged and supercharged. On Long Island’s South Fork, where the highway’s speed limit is 55 mph, the S90’s 316 hp was more than adequate. The car’s drive modes—comfort, eco, and dynamic—change the throttle mapping, the steering response, and the shift points on the 8-speed Geartronic automatic transmission. Even in dynamic mode, the S90 won’t be doing any street racing, but it was well suited to a relaxed excursion past the superyachts docked at Sag Harbor and through the boutique-dotted streets of East Hampton.
The S90’s command center is a large central touchscreen that provides easy access to navigation functions, climate-control settings, and controls for the sound system, which in the test car was a premium Bowers & Wilkins setup. The test car also ran Apple CarPlay, and the Volvo system is one of few that doesn’t lock you out of other functions while CarPlay is running.