Wheels: Still safe to drive?
SAUSALITO, Calif. — STOP!!!!!!
That’s what I hoped, right to the last second, as the 2010 Volvo XC60 surged toward a test barrier.
My instruction had been to drive between 15 to 18 miles per hour — a range in which 75 percent of all collisions occur, most in city driving. But don’t even think about touching the brake pedal, they told me.
And sure enough, during this test at the former Sausalito Army Base — looking up at the Golden Gate Bridge and across to the San Francisco skyline — Volvo’s so-called "City Safety System" was surefire in its sense of impending doom and in its Velcro-grip holding once the car, on its own, applied the brakes.
So here at Cavallo Point — now the home of luxury hotel suites — Volvo had made its point: another step in the automaker’s venerable program of delivering safety.
This was in a downsized vehicle that Volvo calls a CUV, a compact crossover.
It’s more than ready to go head-to-head with such competitors as the BMW X3, the Acura RDX, the Infiniti EX35 and Audi’s Q5.
No car manufacturer likes to talk about what they call, in hushed tones, "future product," but there is no way in hell this feature will not spread in a litmus bleed through Volvo’s future products.
Volvo officials would not say if this safety advance would make its way into cars made by Ford Motor Co., which for the moment owns Volvo.
So now we’ve got a Volvo that is nearly impossible to tip over — you’ve got to do something really, really stupid to accomplish this, as my own testing on a vacant airport runway has shown — and protects driver and occupants with a stability and traction control system that cuts the chance of getting into a crash by more than 40 percent. Further, if you do crash, the mitigation factor of the system means you are also more than 40 percent less likely to die in that crash.
I don’t meant to make it sound like we’re driving an armored truck with medics aboard here.
Indeed, this is one luxurious ride, in the high $30,000 to low $40,000 range.
Outside, unless you are looking directly at the nose, you’d never guess this is a Volvo, especially if you are familiar with the brand’s old boxes of cars favored by those who smoked pipes and had suede patches on the elbows of their herringbone sports jackets.
But this is a Volvo disparate from its own fleet and a car that, legally, unlike A-Roid of the New York Yankees, appears to be on steroids. It has an aggressively wide stance, a certain bulge to the incredibly smooth lines that define it front-to-back, snake-eye headlamps that look like they’ve been swallowed by a bulked-up brow, and rakish vertical rear lights you never thought you would see on a Volvo.
This is definitely not for the suede patch set.
But it is for families who want incredible safety, a sui generis bit of styling compared to the rest of this breed, and a ride defined by comfort, elegance, and utility.
Volvo has obviously injected DNA from its V70, XC70 (a real favorite of mine), and S80 into this new creature. And its 9-inch-plus ground clearance lets this standard all-wheel-drive rig frolic in the mists, mountains, muds, malevolent storms, and murky waters of offroad driving.
It has 281 horsepower and 295 foot pounds of tugging torque (I’ve towed a 21-foot water ski boat easily in a vehicle with that power) though it does tend to suck fuel with a combined highway-city average of about 18 miles per gallon. Its six-speed automatic transmission, with an optional sport mode, helps fight the heft of this 4,200-pound car.
And that is even helped by silver-quick spooling turbocharger that kicks in when the going gets, well, steroidal.
Inside, all is elegance. Stitched two-tone leathers, the wonderful "remote control" that is the thin wafer of control system that flows like a waterfall from dash to low center console, and broad shoulder room give a sense of great freedom of the road.
But back to that City Safety System. Why is it needed in a car that has rural rumbling written all over it? Consider that for oh-so-many buyers of off-road capable vehicles, their destinations are the Hamptons in New York, Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket, the coast of Spain, or to Schulau, where ships are greeted on their way to massive Hamburg harbor with flags and national anthems. Been there, done that.
But I digress. The safety system works thusly: A laser implanted atop the windshield watches for vehicles or objects beginning at about 13 feet of separation. If a collision is imminent, and the driver unaware — it slams the brakes, usually quickly enough to prevent a collision, and certainly, even if contact is made, decreasing the impact and damage.
This does not mean you should feel as though you don’t need to pay attention as you fiddle with your CD player, text message, or chat on the cell phone.
The stop is jolting and rude, as it should be: Telling you, "PAY ATTENTION, STUPID."
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