2023 Volvo S60 Black Edition | It Finally Works!

Here we go. 2023 Volvo S60 T8 Recharge Ultimate Black Edition. If you don't know what the Black Edition is, use your imagination. It's a car that has all the outside accents blacked out. They're mirroring what some of the German competitors are doing. So the grille is blacked out. You have gloss black wheels. The badging is blacked out. It just looks murdered. And luckily for you, there's only 450 units of this available. So it's pretty rare. If you really want the Ultimate Black Edition, you can get it with white paint. The best thing about the S60 is it looks good. This is an understated vehicle and it's better for it. In fact, they're never trying too hard. And that's what Volvo does really good is exterior styling. A lot of that carries over to the interior. It's essentially the same thing they've been doing for the better half of six years. Clean, clean aesthetic. The aluminized trim, the bright works in here looks good. The door panel design, the interior design is just really clean. You have aluminum on the speaker grill. The armrests are quite well padded and it carries over the R-design seats here, which is part fabric and Nappa leather. These are really good seats. If you sit in them for the first time or you just look at them, they're as good as they look to sit in. The back seats are pretty comfortable. If you're under like 6'2", you should have enough headroom unless you're in the middle seat. And there is a small vent that carries over air from the front cabin, but it does not have its own individual HVAC controls. You can opt for seat heaters in the back as well with the cold weather package. And the seats do fold down 60-40 split with an electronic release in the back that dumps the headrests and then of course helps you to release it to fold down the seats. The trunk space is pretty average overall, I'll be honest, but there's nothing that stands out here as being too big or too small. They've updated electronics as well. You now have swipe to open your moonroof and capacitive touch on the upper dome lights here, which, you know, actually works pretty well. Everything else is super clean, what you expect. You have the Ofor's crystal shifter and of course all the nasty piano black that they've still not gotten rid of here, so it just looks gross after a while. Again, this American-only, American-made spec is all for you. Let's talk about the negatives. The gauge cluster is digital and it's pointless. There's very minimal configuration you can do here. It's almost so simple that it's confusing. It takes some time to get used to what everything is and then you really don't pay attention to it. Your infotainment screen is much like the other Volvos. It's a middle ground step to their new stuff. Android automotive, which laughably does not work well with my Android phone. Apparently I have issues with it connecting. Google Maps doesn't work well with it. I mean, I'll leave it at that. The screen quality is poor. The aliasing is really bad on it. It's just poor quality. You can see the text is not all that legible. Getting around the menus is laughable, including the HVAC controls. Changing the temperature is frustrating as hell when you're driving. It's just stupid. It's always been this way and it's just worse now with Android automotive. The big thing here is your drive mode selection is buried in the menus and you can control a few things. You can change it to hybrid mode, you can lock the all-wheel drive with the electric motor in the back, and of course you can switch it to pure EV. It also allows you to force charge the battery in here, so if you want to use the electric motor purely and you don't want to plug it in at home, you can drive on your way home and charge up the battery just using the gasoline engine here to do that. So it's a nice option and you can also hold that energy for later. The only negative thing is when you force charge, there's far more vibration from the four cylinders. That generation is kicking on and you do feel it vibrating the car a bit more. The last thing to talk about is the Bowers, and this is probably something I don't traditionally say. I always say opt for the Bowers, but because the door panel design is shrunken down on the sedans, they lose the space to put the mid-range driver in this middle part of the door, so you lose that vertical alignment. They have to move the mid-range driver next to the tweeter, and the sound stage or the sound separation in here is a lot worse. The sound quality definitely takes a hit from speaker placement in here, and they eliminate the full EQ ability on the head unit, unlike on their higher-end products. So, you know, that's one time I would say skip on the Bowers, honestly. I mean, it's okay, but not worth $3,200. Let's send in the shop, because the majority of the changes here are going to be mechanical. Now it's time to talk about the mechanical changes to the S60 Recharge, and if you've been following along this channel, you'll know we've been through all of these cars in their various iterations, and one of the big reasons why I never recommended the T8 was because of all the problems it had. It had a 2-liter turbocharged engine, a supercharger, and a plug-in hybrid setup. The worst combination of complication. Not only that, they had so many software revisions to fix the way that the front talked to the rear, the electronic programming of the rear motor, handing off power from the supercharger to the turbocharger. It never felt particularly right calibration-wise, and now for the late model year 2022s and 2023s, they've made some revisions. They've dumped the supercharger on the T8, so now you're dealing with a 2-liter turbocharged engine that makes about 315 horsepower and 295 pounds-feet of torque, or thereabouts. So that's pretty good for a 2-liter, and it feels far more seamless. It does require premium fuel, however. The big change is they've upgraded the battery pack to 14.9 kilowatt hours, which means you get about 40 miles of EV-only range here if you plug it in. I talked about kind of the software stuff you can do on the interior part. They've also upgraded the rear motor, so the total system output is now 455 horsepower and around 523 pounds-feet of torque. So there's a lot going on here, and it's still on the same platform that they started, like they designed back in 2015. It's still in the same spot architecture, so you're still dealing with a double wishbone front and multi-link rear, but it does have a leaf spring in the back, a composite leaf spring, but you still have traditional stuff. You don't have air ride here. You don't have adaptive dampers. Most of this stuff is covered up underneath pretty well, and they do do a good job undercoating, so if you're driving this in the winter, you'll want to know that. The last thing to talk about is price spread. This starts about at $55,000 for the S60 Recharge, and then when you go up to different trim levels, you're adding more features, but the performance stays the same. That is until you go up to the $70,000-plus Polestar version of this, which adds Ohlins dampers, special calibration brakes and wheels, but again, this Black Edition is basically the same as all the other S60 Recharges aside from the look. So let's get this out on the road and see if all these changes really transform the car. Jack, we're in the ultimate urban assault weapon. We're in the T8. I'm surprised this isn't on the tow truck yet. Tow truck? I feel that. I know as we talked about, or as you talked about in the shop, how this is a new T8, and I'm happy to hear that because talking to the gentleman that runs the press fleet out here, every T8 they had that was electric, or had the electric system, the supercharger, and the turbocharger ended up being broken. But that was before they rebranded it to the term Recharge. Now that it's called Recharge, all the problems magically went away, Jack. Don't you know that? Power of marketing. So let's talk about this car as a whole because we just got out of the C-Class Mercedes, and we didn't even bring up this car, and there's a reason why we didn't bring it up. It's largely because this generation of Volvo is a mixed bag of it's not full-blown luxury, but when you drive this, and you drive the T8 version of it, you kind of think, well, there are some things that this does really well. Audio system, it's quiet, it looks good, and has a traditional interior. Okay, let's end with that. I mean, am I wrong? No, no, it is. So, like, obviously this isn't as nice as their full-blown, like, XC90 interior, and there's some cost cutting, for sure, which I talked about on the interior segment. In terms of drivability, I think the Recharge part of this, that when you're in that EV-only mode, clearly it's hybrid, so after you cross over to a certain point of power, like, asking too much of the electric motor, it kicks on the gasoline engine, but I've said this before about the Volvo four-popper, they're all two liters, right? The one thing they did great was isolate out the four-cylinder experience, something that almost no brand does as well as them. You can't really tell, it almost sounds like a six-cylinder, it really does. There's no NVH through the engine, and in an idle state, when you're at a stop sign, you don't feel vibration. They did a great job with this. The only problem, really, is when you're getting to, like, especially with the old ones, supercharger, turbocharger, EV, plug-in, hybrid, all that crap, you know, you're amping up the complication to the point that it makes it irrelevant, no matter how good it is, because it's not something you're going to want to keep long term with the serviceability. That's sort of the story of all the Volvos to begin with. Yeah. I will say, I was very down on this car before it showed up, I'm like, why are we doing this? But after spending some time in it with you and driving it for a fair bit, I'm actually kind of impressed. I think as a refined experience, even more so than the C-Class we were just in, this does a better job, right? It has a less gimmicky interior, I think it's even quieter. Despite the aged platform and the suspension compromises, it might actually be softer, to be honest. So I have two issues with the suspension. One is Volvos made clear statements that their focus is 100% safety on the driving dynamics of the car. So what you get out of this, unfortunately, is a very front wheel drive experience with an overwhelming reliance on stability control. You cannot turn this car without the stability control cutting power or stopping the car from any type of movement. So it is like the most boring drive straight experience. It is 100% for safety. In terms of ride quality on normal highway pavement and all that, it's pretty good. But you can feel this chassis is not anywhere near as advanced as the BMW and Mercedes and Audi equivalents. There is this disconnect between the front and the back and the ride quality over choppy stuff. You feel like there's shudder throughout the whole body. It does not do well on these smaller... Do you think it's because of the suspension architecture in the rear or the fact that the body isn't rigid? I think it feels like it's a body rigidity thing to me because I felt this in every single Volvo of this generation. It didn't matter if it had air ride. It didn't matter what price point it was. They all have this jittery body shake to them whenever you hit bad pavement. It's the little bumps or the big bumps? It's the sharp impacts, the moderate impacts where you hit a piece of broken pavement or a small dip in pavement where it's a high frequency impact is where you notice this is not as refined as the German competitors. Because when the suspension over the bumps that I've driven this over, I feel like it does a good job dealing with the compression and rebound effect where it doesn't jostle your spine. I haven't had big bumps with it. I do think to be fair to this car, and I hate to sound like a broken record, if you want a good driving sports sedan and you care about the sporty part, you just buy a BMW. No, agreed. This sacrifices all the drivability fun and fixes it in some of the drivetrain refinement. I'm impressed at how quick this thing is. We're in the cold, which definitely helps a turbocharged four-popper. But the way that, at least in the programming of this car compared to the previous Recharge models we've driven, I haven't had any weird lag or delay from the electric part of the trans-tuning. The trans-tuning is good too. Trans-tuning is probably one of the better trans-tunings I've felt, so whatever revisions they've done to this now is better than it was before. The only thing you'll notice is off the line, dead off the line, unless you brake torque it. Unless you hold the brake and throttle it first, there's like a dead spot for like a second before any of the power kicks on. So that's the only negative part about driving this for me. So with a luxury car, part of this being the priority, not how fast it is, not how it handles at the limit, because to be fair, someone shopping for something like this who wasn't going to buy a G70 or a M340i cares about the refinement luxury part. Would you buy this? The ES, the C-Class, we haven't driven an A4, I know we should have talked about, but we have not been in the most recent A4. What would you buy? For what this is attempting to do, honestly, for interior comfort, isolation, driving character, I would take the ES over this. Because I feel like the ES does the same thing this does for a far less complication, and you're still getting that nerfed like performance, front wheel drive feeling super safe where it doesn't let you do anything. And the ride quality of the ES and the refinement of that car is better in the luxury car part of it, and it's a bigger car on the inside. I see what you mean over these little bumps too. It doesn't, the high frequency stuff is not well isolated in this, and I really do think it's a body structure issue. So that's where I'm looking at it with that, and of course the drivetrain part. You know you're never going to have to worry about a Lexus V6 drivetrain or even their hybrid stuff compared to this, ever. And you're going to get better fuel economy without it being a plug-in, so that's what I'm saying. Yeah, I see your point. Those are the two direct competitors in my mind. I mean even the B58 returns better fuel economy than this. I met a viewer, he has an M340i which has a rear diff, makes a ton of power, he gets over 30 miles to the gallon, which this thing doesn't. At least it doesn't in our experience. I mean it is quick, I will say that it is probably one of the quicker ones and the more refined in terms of drivetrain, in terms of acceleration, but what's the point if you have no ability to turn the car and like do the other things other than go fast in a straight line. It's just kind of like pointless to me. I agree. So Mark let's head in the final thoughts. All right Jack. Final thoughts on the S60 Recharge with a black edition and frankly it's just an appearance package, so this is all going to apply to any trim level you get aside from the Polestar version. So here it is. I drove this car a lot more than I anticipated and I enjoyed almost all of it. I think what I really appreciate here is you see a clear evolution of where they started and I'm really really hard on Volvo in terms of calibration. What they started with with the T8, I'll be completely honest with you, was trash. I never recommended it. Far complicated. The front and the rear felt disconnected. It felt like they were trying too hard. It was an experiment gone wrong and they tried to patch it and fix it out and it just never seemed like they could get it right. And now the car is at a place where when you drive it, the software layer between the driver and the electromechanical systems feels far more natural. Now the contradictory part is they limit the top speed of the car. They give you all this horsepower and torque and then they don't allow you to disable any of the nannies, the stability control system. So they've gotten into a good place where they mask some of the deficiencies in the handling of the car by just kind of tuning them out. They never let you reach the limits of the car where you would notice the problems with it and it's smart because it feels far more natural now. I would argue you don't need all this power out of this car because you can't utilize all of it. And it takes me back to the biggest issue is the chassis feels dated. And you know, I think it lacks some of the body rigidity. I think that the fact that they had to make compromises in the back with the leaf spring, you always feel this like impact and then it creates this high vibration like aftershock into the chassis under certain bumps and you can't get rid of it. Every car has this with this generation. That's the biggest negative compared to the Germans. But I really think in terms of speed and enjoyment, some of the simplicity of the interior, even though this isn't as good as like their upper level SUVs, the door panels are cheaper. Some of the plastics are cheaper. Even the Bowers here, I wouldn't recommend it because they've had to scale it back, not giving you an EQ. The door design is not as good as like the XC60 and the 90. So overall, really this is a surprisingly good car. I would say if you haven't driven this updated version, you should drive it and just think about how different it is now than it used to be and how they're trying to offer something different and a little bit innovative compared to their competitors. I'll give them that. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time. We're creating a computer on wheels capable of running the carefully crafted Volvo experience we want to offer customers. And instead of relying on hundreds of ECUs all over the car, we are moving towards a centralized computing system, our core system. And over here we have one example for our core computer. So this computer has massive CPU, GPU, memory. We will deploy two of these into every car. We'll also connect our Android infotainment system into this network that they communicate over, a high-speed Ethernet network. And they will communicate with the mechatronic rim through gateways.