One all-important new car on a brand-new platform from a major European manufacturer is big news; three of them is a sign of a generational shift.
At the start of the year, the BMW iX3 made all of its rivals look like amateurs, but instead of having the premium medium-sized corner of the electric SUV market to itself for the foreseeable future, it’s now facing two fierce opponents. First there came the Mercedes-Benz GLC Electric with very competitive specs, now Volvo is staking its claim with the Volvo EX60, for the makings of the group test of 2026.
The importance of these cars is not to be understated. The small executive saloon (aka BMW 3 Series rival) has had a good run, but the circa-4.8m-long electric SUV is quickly taking its place.
To the EX60, then. Let’s run through the vital stats before we get into the details. There will be a version with more than 500 miles of WLTP range, and the platform is a dedicated EV one with 800V electricals and 370kW charging. Power is between 369bhp and 671bhp. There’s 523 litres of boot space, plus a decent-size frunk. It’s £56,860 for the basic single-motor EX60, £59,860 for the dual-motor one that most people are going to buy and £70,360 for the top-flight car. Like-for-like, that’s more than for the iX3, but the finance deals look to even things out, so on paper the EX60 has all the attributes to tempt you away from Munich or Stuttgart.
It’s a significant car for Volvo, being the electric equivalent of the brand’s best-selling model ever, the XC60, which continues to draw the crowds into Volvo showrooms.
Not that the EX60 shares much at all with the ICE XC60, of course, because that’s not how you make a competitive EV in 2026. Instead, it’s the debut of the SPA3 platform. If you haven’t been following along with all the acronym stuff, SPA2 was the base for the Volvo EX90 and Polestar 3 and had a rocky rollout, feeling unfinished at launch and being plagued by issues. SPA3 is an evolved, fixed version – hopefully.
Volvo has a thing for seatbelts and keeps developing them. The EX60 uses interior cameras and radars to estimate your height and weight, to that it can determine how much pressure the pre-tensioners need to exert in the event of an accident.Illya VerpraetRoad Tester
Basically everything is new, starting with the battery. Volvo calls its construction cell-to-body because the cells (prismatic and nickel-manganese-cobalt) aren’t grouped into modules. They’re still contained in a big metal box, though, which provides a lot of structural stiffness to the car and can be removed if necessary, so cell-to-pack is a more accurate term.
In the EX60, battery and motor options are tied together, not for any technical reasons but to make the model range a bit simpler. So the smallest battery (83/80kWh) always comes with a single 369bhp rear motor in the P6 for up to 380 miles of range. Then comes the P10, with a 95/91kWh battery and dual motors (268bhp asynchronous at the front, 402bhp permanent magnet synchronous at the back) for 503bhp and up to 410 miles. Finally, the P12 uses the same dual motors but, thanks to higher-grade cells, the battery has more capacity and can provide more power to the motors. As a result, combined output increases to 671bhp, with up to 503 miles from the 117/112kWh battery.
The motors are a new in-house development with better efficiency, which the engineers say they could achieve without using Mercedes-style clutch packs or gearboxes.
Suspension-wise, it has the grade of hardware we expect in this class: the basic P6 has steel coil springs with passive frequency-selective dampers, the P10 and P12 get adaptive dampers. The EX60 Cross Country (due in early 2027) will be available with air suspension to give it that bit of off-road ability its exterior promises.
It’s all wrapped up in a package that builds on the design language we have already seen on the EX30 and EX90, with big ‘Thor’s hammer’ daytime-running lights (the main beams are hidden underneath), big wheels and clean lines. However, compared with the EX30 and EX90, the lines are sharper; particularly obvious is the angular shoulder line.
Pleasingly, it’s a traditional SUV shape, rather than pretending to be a coupé. It doesn’t try to be weird or edgy just because it’s an EV. The EV-ness does come through in how tall the body is relative to the glasshouse (they had to hide the battery pack somewhere), but thankfully this isn’t as obvious in the metal as it is in pictures.
One area where the designers couldn’t resist some fripperies is the door handles. They’re little fins with rubber buttons sticking out from the window frames. They work okay, and there’s a redundant electrical system in case the power fails, but that still seems like a lot of complication when a normal flappy handle would work better and break up the door surface a bit.
Inside, it’s a similar story to the design and engineering: the EX60 doesn’t break with the style and philosophy of the EX90, but it’s obvious that Volvo has learned some lessons. It’s still clean and minimalist, so it does appear a little plain at first glance, but actually there’s a fair bit of detail to drink in. The EX60 doesn’t feature wall-to-wall digital screens and is all the better for it. The flowing layers of wood, fabric and leather-like materials give a much homelier atmosphere than any recent Mercedes and the perceived quality is a cut above BMW’s.
There are lots of storage cubbies and shelves to discover and the central glovebox is opened using a mechanical button instead of a touchscreen. More outbreaks of common sense come in the form of four window switches and proper buttons on the steering wheel. Annoyingly, you still adjust the steering wheel and mirrors using the touchscreen and the steering wheel buttons, but Volvo is on the road to recovery here.
The boot floor lifts up in two parts, so you needn’t empty the whole boot to get at the deep underfloor well. Volvo will sell you a plastic bucket that fits in there to store mucky things like crabs. Yes, really: it has images of crabs moulded onto it, because apparently Sweden loves crab fishing. Illya VerpraetRoad Tester
While we’re on the topic of screens and wheels, the steering wheel is small and a slightly weird shape (but pleasing enough to hold), because you look over the top of it at the driver’s display. Like in the iX3, the display is set at the end of the dashboard, which works really well, because it reduces the need for your eyes to refocus from the road and makes a head-up display redundant.
Unlike on all Volvos of the past 10 years, the big central touchscreen is in landscape orientation, because Volvo has finally realised that it’s the standard for a good reason: it leaves more space to have permanent controls for the climate and a few shortcuts.
Its software is a development of the EX90’s, working quickly and more logically and giving easy access to the stuff you need frequently. The home screen could do with a bit more configurability, but that’s apparently coming at some point down the line. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto will arrive weeks after launch.
Volvo is quite proud of the Google Gemini AI-powered voice assistant, which works well for finding navigation destinations, chargers and the like but still has some way to go before it can help you with finding the car’s more obscure settings or more complicated queries.
Even more impressive is the spaciousness of the EX60’s interior, both perceived and measurable. Volvo offering light colours and fitting a glass roof as standard helps, and all that structural engineering has paid off in various ways.
To start, the floor (which is literally the top of the battery) feels relatively low, so the seating position in both rows is nice and natural, while the boot is fairly low too, with a big well at the back. And there’s a frunk, albeit not a huge one, of 58 litres.
Nestle into the typically outstanding seats (which come as standard) and you simply have to put your foot on the brake and pull the drive selector stalk into Drive to go. That’s the idea, anyway.
The phone-as-a-key that came with my test car had to have its Bluetooth turned off and on again before the car would recognise it. Volvo blames Apple and does give you a plastic puck and a card as a back-up, but it’s disappointing that one of the most vexing problems of the SPA2-platform cars (revisit our Polestar 3 long-term reports if you want to be reminded of the misery) still persists. A proper key is coming later, but that really should have been job one – not an afterthought.
There are a couple of regen strengths, including a freewheeling mode. Then you can toggle 'creep' (where it creeps forwards like a conventional automatic) separately. Turning it off gives you one-pedal driving. It's more intuitive than it sounds and gives you great flexibility to tailor the driving experience to your preference.Illya VerpraetRoad Tester
Thankfully, things quickly improve, because the EX60 drives exactly as you would want a Volvo to: quiet, serene and quick when you need it to, without tugging at the leash. You adjust the regenerative braking and toggle the automatic gearbox-style creep function in the screen rather than with paddles, but there’s something for everyone and every setting is smooth and progressive, with no quirks.
The single-motor P6 is usefully quick and the dual-motor P10 is push-you-back-in-your-seat fast without being overwhelming. Both versions seem impressively efficient too: I saw 4.0mpkWh from the P6 and 3.6mpkWh from the P10, albeit on different test routes.
I didn’t get to drive the P12, but its 671bhp might be a bit excessive. After all, I wouldn’t call the EX60 a driver’s car. The engineers say they were aiming for something predictable, controllable and comfortable and, based on the versions I’ve driven, I’d say they achieved that.
The steering is light and filtered, giving no feedback to speak of, but it’s measured, precise and consistently weighted. Meanwhile, there’s lots of grip, not much roll and a fundamentally neutral balance, even though the overly cautious traction control system does its best to smother it.
When on adaptive cruise control, the EX60 can perform automated lane changes when you use the indicators. It's not the first car to do this, but it's the first one I've experienced where it was fast and assertive enough that I didn't lose patience with it. In general, its assisted driving features are very well-resolvedIllya VerpraetRoad Tester
In short, you can absolutely make satisfyingly quick progress on a twisty road, but the iX3 is more involving – which seems like appropriate BMW-Volvo relations, particularly if the EX60 rides well.
Which, on initial evidence, it does. Spanish roads can flatter to deceive but, particularly on the adaptive dampers, the ride felt quiet and flat, with very good bump absorption. The passive suspension was a little more prone to being tripped up by rough roads but still felt settled enough. The engineers did actually do ride tuning in the UK, because they realised that if it works here, it will work anywhere, so I am getting my hopes up.
Note that I haven’t talked about the advanced driver assistance systems yet. That’s because they’re fine. Disabling the overspeed warning is a one-button thing, the driver monitoring and lane keeping assistance leave you alone unless they have actual cause to intervene and the adaptive cruise control works how you would expect. It really feels like we’re now emerging on the other side of the ADAS hellscape, and I didn’t expect to be doing it in a Volvo.
Prices start from £56,860 for a single-motor P6 in Plus trim, which is already very well-equipped. Ultra trim, which gets you the excellent Bowers & Wilkins audio system, electrochromatic dimming for the panoramic roof and adaptive headlights, comes at a hefty premium of almost £6000. At just £3000 more, the P10, with its bigger battery and dual motors, seems like better value. Another £5000 on top of that gets you the 500-mile, 671bhp P12, but you’ll have to wait until next year.
The P10 is expected to be the biggest seller, and while its 410 miles make it less rangey than the iX3 50 despite costing only slightly less when specced similarly, the Volvo is quite a bit cheaper on finance.
The P6 seems like the one to have, because it's cheaper and more efficient than the rest, and still has plenty of range. I would want the adaptive dampers, though, which only come on the P10 and P12.Illya VerpraetRoad Tester
The P6 has a WLTP range of 380 miles and charges at up to 320kW; the P10 does 410 miles and charges at up to 370kW; the P12 does 503 and charges at up to 370kW. On the launch test drive, I saw 4.0mpkWh from the P6 and 3.6mpkWh from the P10, which suggests an impressive real-world range of 320-330 miles for both.
I'm very impressed with the EX60, because apart from the key problem and the dearth of physical buttons, I’m struggling to seriously find fault with the EX60, and that’s with the game-changing BMW iX3 fresh in my memory.
That feels like a big moment, because after years of Volvos that were good-looking and ambitious but ultimately frustrating and flawed, it’s very satisfying to get into one that genuinely impresses.
The big questions are whether Volvo has got a handle on reliability and whether the ride quality holds up in the UK. But based on this first drive, I can’t wait for the iX3 and GLC Electric triple test, because I wouldn’t want to bet on the result.
As a road tester, Illya drives everything from superminis to supercars, and writes reviews and comparison tests, while also managing the magazine’s Drives section. Much of his time is spent wrangling the data logger and wielding the tape measure to gather the data for Autocar’s in-depth instrumented road tests.
He loves cars that are fun and usable on the road – whether piston-powered or electric – or just cars that are very fit for purpose. When not in test cars, he drives an R53-generation Mini Cooper S or a 1990 BMW 325i Touring.