Volvo’s new EX60 is the mid-sized EV the brand has been building towards – does it stand up?

Barcelona in early summer is not a bad place to put a new car through its paces. The city's grid of wide boulevards and tight Gothic Quarter streets makes for a useful test of any car's urban abilities – and then the motorway north allows for a foot-to-the-floor thrill. Volvo chose the location deliberately. The EX60, its new all-electric mid-size SUV, deserved a dynamic test ground to put its ambitions to the test.

Those ambitions are pretty considerable. The EX60 enters the industry's most fiercely contested segment, where the BMW iX3, Audi Q6 e-tron, Tesla Model Y, and Mercedes GLC Electric are already established cars.

Also, it carries the weight of an illustrious predecessor: the XC60, which in July 2025 surpassed 2.7 million sales to overtake even the beloved, iconically boxy 240 as the brand's best-selling car of all time. Designed predominantly for what Volvo calls the ‘progressive modern family’, it has to be ‘a car for all’. That is a considerable pair of shoes to fill.

This new EX60 design is the first car from Volvo’s third-generation Scalable Platform Architecture (SPA3). It includes mega-casted aluminium and cell-to-body manufacturing, next-generation e-motors, and unified software and hardware technology – Volvo says the EX60 has the lowest carbon footprint and the highest amount (27 per cent) of recycled content of any Volvo car to date.

Visually, Volvo has focused on curating an aerodynamic design. A drag coefficient of 0.26 makes this a genuine claim, rather than just a gesture. There is no intimidating front grille; in its place, a cleaner, more discerning face. The new haptic wing-grip door handles dissolve into the side profile, complemented by frameless doors, flush glazing, and the high-definition pixel ‘Thor's Hammer’ headlights. This latest iteration of Volvo’s tall vertical taillights is also a nice touch – reminiscent of the 1990s V70 design. Certainly, at first glance, the EX60 is a sleek-looking machine.

Volvo has utilised mega-casting and cell-to-body construction, the former to create a huge single-piece aluminium rear floor with battery cells integrated directly into the structure itself. The practical upshot is a lower, flatter floor and more usable interior space, alongside improvements in rigidity and impact protection.

Three battery options are available. The entry-level P6 – single motor, rear-wheel drive – offers 374hp and a projected range of up to 379 miles; a convincing case for most buyers. Our test car was the mid-spec P10 AWD, with 510hp and 0-60 in 4.4 seconds, and it felt every bit of it out on the motorway.

At the top of the range, the P12 AWD pushes to 680hp, dispatches 0-60 in 3.8 seconds, and still covers up to 503 miles on a charge. Across all three, 800V technology means a 10-80 per cent charge takes as little as 16 minutes. In practice, this means ‘range anxiety’ begins to feel like a thing of the past.

In terms of ride and handling, the chassis has been tuned to feel more dynamic than the larger Volvo EX90 – and it’s a decision that pays off. The standard Advanced Chassis includes Frequency Selective Damping, which reads the road mechanically and adjusts accordingly. Step up to the optional Active Chassis, available on the P10 AWD and P12 AWD, and the system monitors the car, the road, and the driver up to 500 times per second.

Alongside the car’s built-in HuginCore system (named for a bird in Norse mythology), there’s also Google Gemini with conversational AI, which means you can talk to your car naturally. For example, it can respond to requests for beauty spots to stop off at en route.

The urban leg of the drive felt reassuringly effortless. The car's suite of driver assistance systems – which includes five cameras, five radars and 12 ultrasonic sensors to give a 360-degree real-time view of the surroundings – takes the edge off city navigation. Out on the motorway, you can feel the powertrain options come into play. We put our foot down in our P10 AWD, and it certainly didn’t feel slow.

Inside, the cabin is where Volvo's Scandinavian restraint really translates. Sara Erichsen Susnjar, senior colour & material design manager at Volvo, says, ‘We wanted to create a calm, comfortable environment that instills a sense of control while also making you feel cared for. Each element is thoughtfully designed to serve either a functional or aesthetic role.’ It is calm, considered, and free of the gratuitous surface complexity that afflicts many of its rivals – a cocoon rather than a cockpit.

The UK gets two trim levels at launch – Plus and Ultra. Plus is no spartan entry point; alongside the exterior 20-inch, five-spoke matt/diamond-cut alloys and Matrix LED headlights, the interior comes with heated front and rear seats, three-zone climate control, a Bose premium sound system, and a panoramic glass roof. It sets a luxury tone from the outset.

The higher spec Ultra trim, which served as our test car, came with 21-inch, five-spoke graphite diamond-cut alloys (you can ‘supersize’ this further with the 22-inch, Y-spoke matt black option), high-definition pixel headlights, a Bowers & Wilkins high fidelity audio system, an Electrochromic roof, and the optional ventilated Nappa leather seats. Safety, as ever with Volvo, is non-negotiable: Volvo’s newly developed Multi-adaptive front safety belts, the HuginCore platform, and the Advanced Sensing Technology system are fitted as standard across the range.

One detail to note: Volvo plans on releasing the EX60 Cross Country variant mid-next year, and we caught a glimpse of the prototype model on the trip. Built on the same electric foundation as the EX60, the EX60 Cross Country has a slightly hiked stance – 20mm as standard, but using the standard air suspension's off-road mode, you can gain another 20mm, so 40mm total – and adaptive air suspension that fine-tunes height and damping for comfort and stability. The example we laid eyes on had a very appealing Ventilated Midnight Blue Tailored Knit interior option – exclusive on the Cross Country model. We’d be tempted to wait a few more months for this one.

What’s the verdict? Ultimately, what the EX60 delivers is coherence. It is as capable of a brisk motorway overtake as it is of wafting more glacially to the school gates – and it does both without the identity crisis that afflicts some of its more performance-focused rivals. Whether it can match the XC60's extraordinary commercial legacy remains to be seen. On the evidence we gathered and experienced, it has every right to try.

Volvo EX60, from £56,860, Volvocars.com, @VolvocarUK