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jcreator
From the June 2015 issueBack in college, I got the idea that I wanted a V-8–powered Volvo 240. The V-8 Volvo is synonymous with Ross Converse, a mad genius whose brochure included a photo of a diesel-badged 240 doing a righteous burnout. I loved the notion of a sleeper 240 packing a Mustang 302, so I arranged a visit with Converse at his house in Portland, Maine. I was hoping he’d have a completed car that I could check out, and he did. But it wasn’t quite the ratty 240 that I might plausibly afford. There in his driveway was a brand-new 960 wagon that looked stock except for aftermarket wheels and a big exhaust tip. “This is a clone to the cars I did for David Letterman and Paul Newman,” he said. “Want me to fire it up?” A better question might’ve been, “Want me to ruin your expectations for years to come?” I have a weakness for vehicles with the wrong engines—at the time, my most recent car was a 1979 BMW 323i that had a 3.0-liter Bavarian six crammed under the hood—and the Newman-spec wagon was as wonderfully wrong as it gets.
That 960 had a supercharged 302 and a Tremec five-speed manual. It was about the coolest thing I’d ever seen—the barbaric gurgle of a cammed-up Fox-body Mustang V-8 emanating from an anonymous late-model Swedish family car. As Newman told Letterman, in this car, “from 20 to a hundred you can chew anybody’s ass.”
I didn’t end up with a Converse Volvo because the project seemed too daunting, too expensive for a broke college student. You had to find a wrecked 5.0 Mustang (plenty of those) plus a non-rusty Volvo 240 (in Maine: rare as a blue lobster), then get Converse’s conversion kit and have him put it all together. Ultimately, if you wanted a freaky-quick Swedish car, it was easier to just get a Saab 9000 Turbo. Which is what I eventually did. But the pining for a sleeper Volvo never went away, as evidenced by my unreasonable infatuation with the 2015 S60 Polestar.
Granted, the car that I drove—number 38 out of 40 for the U.S. market—wasn’t painted in the most subtle color, the bodywork sprayed with a shade of blue somewhere between windshield-washer fluid and the hue of a calving iceberg. Polestar’s press manager referred to it as “Swedish racing green.” But other than that, the Polestar looks much like any other S60, handsome but familiar. This body’s been around long enough that when I looked under the hood, I saw “FoMoCo” stamped on the strut tower.
2015 Volvo S60 Polestar The Polestar doesn’t drive like anything conceived during the Ford days, though. The 345-hp straight-six rips you back in the seat while the intake and exhaust harmonize in a way that recalls a 911 Turbo—no Auto-Tuned remix playing through the stereo. This thing’s so analog that if you want to adjust the Öhlins dampers, you crawl under the car (front) and remove trim in the trunk (rear). The Polestar supplement to the owner’s manual shows you how to do it.
The Haldex four-wheel-drive system puts the power down, too. This magazine recorded a zero-to-60 of 4.5 seconds, quick enough to get the drop on many a Bimmer. I loved it, and I promptly recommended the V60 version to a friend who’s looking for a four-wheel-drive wagon. He called the dealer and began formulating a potential strategy for convincing his wife that a $62,000 tuner Volvo makes more sense than an Audi Allroad.
Well, the thing is, it doesn’t, any more than it makes sense to gut a perfectly good 960 and stuff it full of V-8 crate engine. But the coolest cars are often the ones that defy rationality. And these days even the mainstream Volvos are getting real weird with it, in the best possible way.
The Polestar doesn't have a suspension button. It has you, crawling under the car. I’ll admit that when the Chinese bought Volvo, I got worried that we were heading for the same sort of undercapitalized fade to mediocrity that GM inflicted on Saab. When I didn’t hear anything from Volvo for a few years, I figured Geely was busy pillaging Volvo’s intellectual property so it could figure out how to build a car that doesn’t look like a sketch from The Simpsons. But then last year, Volvo abruptly revealed that they’d been in the lab with a pen and a pad, drawing up a four-banger with supercharging and turbocharging. And a plug-in, 400-hp XC90 T8. And a pilot program for fully autonomous cars to run around Gothenburg. It may turn out that Geely is a cooler boss than Ford ever was.
Last fall, I met with a bunch of Volvo executives at the Los Angeles auto show. By way of stating Volvo’s grand ambitions, one of these rangy Vikings declared, “We’re the fastest-growing luxury brand on every continent but one.” He let that sink in for a second, until I blurted, “Look out, Australia!” That meeting ended shortly thereafter. So I slunk over to the XC90 display, where an engineer told me that the hybrid will do a four-wheel-drive burnout off the line. At that moment, the hybrid XC90 immediately jumped to the top of the list for my next family vehicle.
A car like that, a handsome Volvo crossover, won’t attract much attention. But I’ll bet that from 20 to a hundred, it’ll chew anyone’s ass.
Noah JosephVolvos are made in Sweden, right? Everyone knows that. Only they're also made in Belgium, in China, and soon in South Carolina.
