VOLVO EX90 review | The Safest EV SUV in the world?

VOLVO EX90 review | The Safest EV SUV in the world?

The Volvo EX90 is an electric sevenseater from Volvo that has been a long time coming. In fact, I was meant to be driving this car many months ago, but it was delayed. Why was it delayed? Like so many new cars, it’s heavily reliant on software, and that was essentially the reason. Now, there’s been lots of talk on the internet about software issues with the EX90. I’ve been driving it for a week now and I have to say it hasn’t thrown up a single error. So, software from my experience has been sorted. Now, software is a massive, massive deal on this car. That up there is a LAR sensor. It’s projecting forward, but not just forward. This car can sense a pedestrian in the dark on the road. It’s got cameras underneath and behind the mirrors. And essentially, this car has been futurep proofed for autonomous driving with overthe-air updates. In fact, Volvo’s engineers say this car will actually get better with time. This car famously has been quite a bit more expensive than most other electric 7seaters on the market. Way dear than the Kia EV9, the upcoming Tesla Model Y with seven seats, the Hyundai Ionic 9. There’s there’s a lot of cars. The good news is Volvo have now price matched this car to an XC90, the plug-in hybrid version of their sevenseater. So, they’ve effectively wiped the guts of 17 grand off the price of this car. There is also a performance version of this car, which bumps the power up by an additional 100 brake horsepower, but that’s €4,000 extra. So, this car is currently about €122,000. But that is good news that they’re price matching the car with the XC90 because for most people it just didn’t make sense at sort of a hundred grand. Yes, it’s still an expensive car but it’s at least the same price and yes it’s about 17 grand dear for an equivalent Kia but it’s a Volvo. A bit of good news for a change then you might say. So on the front we have these huge Thor hammer headlights. Some lower lights part of the unit here. Also another sensor in the Volvo badge. Bit of black high gloss lower down. Underneath here is a frunk. Strangely, it’s not covered when you open the bonnet, though. I thought they could at least do that to keep things dry. I feel like I’m dodging a massive thunderstorm. So, I’m going to crack on with this review. 22-in alloy wheels. It’s over 5 m long. It’s over 2 m wide. There’s lots and lots of interior space. You can adjust that bench to give the rear row some extra space if you like. It can tow 2.2 ton. You’ve got to get a toe bar obviously on the car and that is a 1,500 euro optional extra on the rear. Then the latest Volvo design language. I like the way the lights kind of cut into the boot here, mirroring the design language of the EX30, for example. Boot release is all the way down here. You can swipe your foot under to open it. Also, 310 L if you’ve got all the rows up. That rises to just under 2,000 L if you drop everything down. Now, there is what looks like a little groove down here to put the parcel cover in. You’re pulling that carpet to do it. I gave up because it just wouldn’t really work for me. Now, maybe I’m doing something wrong. I don’t think I am, however, cuz I’ve done this in other seven seaters and it’s easy to do. Then, under here, you have some space. There’s nowhere to latch this on and keep it up as you’re rumaging through cables or whatever. That’s kind of annoying. And maybe I’ll keep the cables in the front so you’re not moving luggage like I’m trying to do here. If you regularly carry stuff in the boot on the luggage front, then if I bring up all the rows of seats, you’ll get a suitcase on its side and maybe a a 10 kiloish bag as well without having to mess with seats. So you can still carry passengers essentially like that. You can raise or lower the suspension with some buttons here. There will be a there’s a blank plate at the moment, but for the toeb bar also, you can raise and lower the third row of seats with these buttons, and you can do it from the passenger side of the doors in the rear. So, you’re you’ve got lots of options for for doing that. And they’re actually pretty quick and how they lift and drop. And then, as you can see with my head space, if you’re sitting in that third row, leg room’s not great either for adults, to be honest with you. But certainly, if you’re over 6′ tall, I don’t think your head is going to fit. I’m a little bit surprised as well there’s no ISAIX in that third row. So there’s only two in Volvo. As you might expect, it is nice in the back in the middle row of seats. Very very like uh an XC90. I think that’s the whole point of the car. Yes, an electric powertrain, but it has the same features essentially. So dual zone climate control. You can heat the seats back here. Get an armrest if you’re not using the middle row. It’s got some grabable cup holders here. You can do this and fit stuff in. Maybe if you’re at IKEA, whatever. Two USBC charging ports. There’s room well under the seats for your feet, so you really can stretch out. You can also, if you want to give your third row some extra room. You can move these seats forward individually. All three of them have individual adjustments. This glass roof, it’s going to shield the heat from you. Even though there’s no cover, it’s meant to work quite well. You get some nice ambient lighting at nighttime from these uh over the the head and in the interior of the headlining that shines down. You can turn it off, but it’s kind of a a very kind of warm cozy feeling at nighttime. No window blinds pull up and down, but these are tinted windows also. And there’s the addition of some lovely little recess lighting in the door bins, which again cozy nighttime vibes. Very Swedish. Same story up here. You could call it minimalist maybe. You have this stuck on huge huge tablet style screen with everything. All the safety stuff can be manipulated. There’s an Abbey Road acoustic sound equalizer which is cool. Not not sure is there a nod to the Beatles somewhere in there or where they going with that. Your plug share app can be integrated into the car. You log in. It also has Google. So essentially like your Google maps, your phone works here. Bars and Wilkins sound system. It’s pretty good. does take a bit of tweaking to get to my personal preference. Um, couple of things that bug me. So, there’s no aircooled seats or certainly there’s no option on on this car from what I can tell. And then there’s this thing. So, this is the key. Now, you’ll also use your phone and there’s an NFC and all that stuff, right? But this has to be charged. There’s even some little grooves on the plate here for charging it. And if you forget to do that, well, you might be stuck. Now, again, you will have it on on your phone, but it was just something that caught me out one of the days when it wasn’t charged. Uh, there’s this pause and play button for the sound system. You may hit off that when driving. I haven’t. There’s a cover for keeping things secure. There’s an armrest under here. It’s kind of just quite small for the size of the car. The seats are obviously amazingly comfortable. Um, on I’ve only been able to take the heated seats on the first setting of heat. They’re incredibly intense. Uh, you open the glove box with the screen. You turn on the lights with the screen. Obviously, you can leave them in auto, but I like driving with the main lights on. Here’s the rain starting now. Um, so there is a lot of manipulation via this screen. You obviously have this driver instrument one as well. The buttons don’t light up, so they’re not back lit, which is a bit frustrating. Um, you operate the cruise by just pulling down on the stock for engaging drive, reverse, and neutral. Obviously, head-up display. another uh tweeter. You might expect to have a digital rear view mirror, but there’s not. There’s just the standard one, and there’s some more buttons up here uh like your SOS button, as you might expect. The door bins are all right. I love that there’s some extra storage down here, although in this cream color. So, there’s basically black, cream, and cardamom. There’s no extra charge for light or the cardamom, which looks very, very nice. Actually, I’d love to see in the flesh. This is a denim exterior color. It’s about €1,250 optional extra if you think that’s worth it. Wooden pedal driving. Turn off the speed beeps with this intelligent speed assist. There used to be one on the a shortcut on Volvos on the steering wheel, the left arrow here. It seems to be gone from what I can tell. Um then you have your camera which is pretty savage. You’ve got this three 3D uh totally immersive view and I suppose the LAR is helping with that massively. Then you’ve got a front camera and a rear camera and they stay on till about 17 18 km/h. Google assistant is also in here. Um this is your plug share so you can integrate your phone basically with that. Tune in and Spotify also and you can watch YouTube. Not when you’re driving obviously, but you can watch YouTube and you can even search for this fella called Nobby on cars if uh you want to maybe subscribe to the channel and uh you know there’s there’s my latest video. So yeah, there’s there’s loads of them. That was an expensive one. I’ll have an update on that car soon. Um so uh lots of stuff to keep you busy when you’re charging. On the charging front is 250 kilowatt DC, which is only okay. It’s 400volt architecture, an NMC lithium-ion battery. Uh just over 107 kWh is usable. It’s a big big battery. Do not buy this car if you can’t charge at home cuz unless someone else is paying the bills cuz at 66 cent uh for a fast charge per kilowatt hour and possibly rising, uh that is that is very very expensive. Um you can precondition the battery. There’s a heat pump as standard, but some of the stuff coming from China and it’s weird that you know Gilly who own Volvo are a Chinese company. Uh now maybe that will change over the air in time, but 250 kW is okay for now. 10 to 80% in about 33 minutes. It’s going to take well overnight while you’re sleeping to charge it to full. Now, you probably won’t be charging it to full all the time, but yeah, it’s a big big Whopper battery. A claimed range of up to 600 kilometers. Now, bearing in mind that this car has been operating for the last few months in summertime, you know, favorableish weather conditions. So, over the last 1,100 km, it’s done 25 kW hours per 100 km. My driving about 22, which is all right for a car with over 500 brake horsepower. There is a 400 brake horsepower version as well. I mean, it’s it’s ridiculous speed. is the size of the thing and it can move at about 5 seconds to 100 km an hour, but that’s looking like the range in reality. Um, now Volvo say you could get up to 800 km. I don’t know where you’d be driving for that. I think real world maybe 500 km when it’s not really really cold. And if you have one already, let me know and let everyone else know in the comments down below what sort of fuel efficiency you’ve been achieving. Even with 500 brake horsepower or just over 400 on the normal twin motor, so they’re all all-wheel drive, it’s it is a quick car, but it’s not a car you want to drive quick, if you get me. It’s not great in corners cuz it’s 2 and 1/2 ton, but it has an air suspension, so it is incredibly smooth. Um, it just wafts over bumps, potholes, bad roads. It’s about getting passengers, seven of them to their destination extremely safely and extremely comfortable in this case. Obviously, tons of visibility out the windscreen, huge glass windows, huge mirrors, every safety and blind spot and gadget and driving off the road mitigation avoidance, cyclist avoidance. You get a warning triangle if you’re approaching a school. Like it has safety stuff that just no one else does. And weirdly, I mean, it’s wet now, but during the week when I was driving it and just really accelerating hard away from a standill, it’s it’s kind of mind-blowing how quickly this thing can shift. And there’s no wheel slip, there’s no wheel hop. It’s just gone. And that’s the combination I suppose of modern cars, particularly electric cars. You know, years ago, you just wouldn’t have had Volvos with this level of brake horsepower. Not in these kind of cars anyway. Yes, there were one or two famous estates over the years that even the police managed to get their hands on, but you know, this does it need all this power over 700 new meters of torque. I mean, it has to have everything dialed in, I suppose, in case you do want to tow 2 and 1/2 ton with seven people on board. you know, that might be the time where you do need all that extra power, but for going to the school, it’s just not necessary. Uh the steering is okay. There’s no huge level of feedback from it as such. Uh but it’s light and it makes quite a large car. Again, it’s over 5 m long, barely registering 60 dibels. Like that, that is quiet. Steering feedback in the sense of lane keep assist is quite strong. It won’t let you veer into the wrong side of the road. I’m just trying it now and doesn’t really want to let you do that which is obviously good. Um you can get the one pedal working in auto mode or you can manually press the button so that it’s true one pedal driving. It just brings the car to a stop. Best case scenario though, and again it’s not a slow car. Looks it looks like 22 kilwatt hours per 100 kilometers. I just can’t get over how smooth it is, how quiet it is, and I suppose how powerful it is, but that’s kind of not the point of the car. And now with the price drop, there’s not a huge amount else I can say. Just if you have the funds, just go and buy one. Is now a better time to buy an EX90 because of the price drop? Well, obviously it’s now price matched with the plug-in hybrid XC90, which it always had to be. You might ask, why did Volva price it the way they did in the first place? Uh, but really the price was the only thing holding the car back. Again, this is not a cheap car. Um, a lot of people can’t and couldn’t afford it, but there’s plenty of XC90s in the road. And for those people, they now have the option of going electric and at least running the car for a lot less because at home, for example, it’s easy to get a overnight rate of about 7 to 10 cent per kilowatt hour. And that means you charge the car for a little over 10 quid, which is a lot cheaper than putting petrol into it. And the plug-in hybrid range of the XC90 could actually be a little bit better than it is. It doesn’t even reach 100 km. So, for me now, it’s a bit of a well, why wouldn’t you buy an electric version? You get an ridiculous amount of power and you can charge it pretty cheaply. And it’s so filled with tech that it really is in many ways one of the most advanced. Certainly has to be one of the safest cars you can buy on the market right now. All of that said, there obviously are cheaper alternatives on the market from Kia, Hyundai, Tesla down the road, but it’s still not an an exactly saturated market. If you don’t need the extra row of seats, the new upcoming BMW i3 is considerably cheaper as well at low70,000 euro and a similar kind of battery size and range. So, let me know what you think. Um, have you had one of these cars before from Volvo in a petrol or maybe even a diesel form? and would this price drop now convince you to go EX90? Let me know all the thoughts, the questions, the comments you have. Really do appreciate you watching the video today, maybe even watching the ads in full. It really, really does help support the channel. And if this review has earned your following, you might consider subscribing to the channel as well. Thanks so much for watching and I’ll see you next time. [Music]

#Volvo #VolvoEX90 #VolvoXC90

The Volvo EX90 is finally here – a fully electric 7-seater that’s been delayed for months due to software issues. I’ve spent a week living with it, and in this review I’ll tell you what it’s really like.

✅ Has Volvo fixed the software?
✅ How much space is inside for 7 passengers?
✅ What’s the real-world range and charging speed?
✅ Is it worth the €122,000 asking price – especially now that Volvo has slashed the price to match the XC90 plug-in hybrid?
✅ And is this now the safest, most advanced family EV on the market?

From its Thor Hammer headlights, massive interior, Google-based infotainment, and future-proof autonomous-ready tech, to the 107kWh battery, 250kW charging, and up to 600km claimed range, the EX90 is Volvo’s most ambitious car yet.

It’s not cheap, but compared to rivals like the Kia EV9, Hyundai Ioniq 9, Tesla’s upcoming 7-seat Model Y, and BMW’s new iX, does it finally make sense?

👉 Watch the full review to find out if the Volvo EX90 is the premium 7-seater EV worth your money.

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