Fleet preview Volvo ES90 Interior:
The long 3.1-metre wheelbase allows space for a large cabin inside where occupants both in the front – and especially in the back – can stretch out with ease. Rear seats individually recline, and knee and head room are limo-like. The interior aesthetic and design is similar to its bigger EX90 SUV, but with a lower and more open centre console area and door armrests which house the pull-up style opening handles at their front ends, as featured on sister brand Polestar’s 3 and 4. The whole ensemble – launched in a colour palette of beiges and greys, with wool, leather and light wood options – is distinctly Scandinavian and calming. Regular boot space is 424 litres with seats up and 733 litres once the individually foldable rear seats are flattened – a space nicely accessible from the fastback’s large and wide hatch – plus there’s another 22-litre ‘frunk’ upfront for charging cables.
The new ES90 is a long-range, safe-as- houses, large fastback EV which looks as interesting as it sounds, as Guy Bird reports.
Exterior:
There’s a glut of premium-priced, executive-sized full-electric cars on the market right now, particularly SUVs and saloons, so Volvo made a wise choice to make its latest EV a fastback, which is a practical shape and segment and currently one with fewer rivals. In the flesh, the five-metre long car hides its length well, with a smart and broadly sleek silhouette integrating a relatively low, circa 1.5-metre, roofline sloping down towards the rear hatch. Exterior visual details follow current Volvo electric design cues, with horizontally aligned, capital T-shaped ‘Thor hammer’ front lights, a ‘closed mouth’ front face and simple but elegant body surfacing and lines uninterrupted by flush door handles.
Safety:
Volvo is well-known for its safety-first credentials and unsurprisingly offers a great deal of crash-avoidance and mitigation equipment on the ES90 – including its most advanced sensor suite yet including one lidar, five radars, seven cameras and 12 ultrasonic sensors – developed with the help of the marque’s own real-world accident data. The only small visual downside of this kit is the taxi light-style protruding safety sensor at the top of the windscreen which is hard to unsee once spied, but Volvo’s head of global design, Jeremy Offer told BusinessCar that the next version will be much smaller (and thus easier to package more unobtrusively). Meantime he and his team decided to make a feature of it, rather than choose a much more expensive deploy-on-demand, pop-up type approach (like Lotus has opted for on its newest EVs).
36 | March/April 2025 |
www.businesscar.co.uk
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