And I got to say, after watching nearly every review done on this car, there’s really two things going on.
The first thing is decisions made by Volvo that basically made features, modes, or options hidden, and it’s really coming back to bite them with all these reviewers missing things and giving the car lower reviews than they otherwise would have. In Doug’s review he obviously misses the drive modes, because they’re hidden in the menu. In savagegeese’s review he barely tries the power mode and complains that there’s a delay in acceleration (because they’re labeled Hybrid, Power, and Pure, when if they were labeled more industry standard like Sport, Standard, and Eco he would have most likely noticed in “Sport” mode it’s gone.) All of the reviews (outside of LinusTechTips’ review of the S90) miss out of the fact this is one of the rare cars that can run on gas that also has one pedal driving, because it’s not intuitive to go into the options to disable creep mode and then every time start the car into B mode instead of D.
The second thing is just plug-in hybrids in general. I honestly think that unless the reviewer has actually owned a plug-in hybrid before, or has the car for an extended period of time, they really can’t understand why it would be a great option for so many people. And Volvo’s implementation of it is one of the industries best, everything from allowing the user control over the battery (Auto, Charge, Hold, you’d be surprised that very few other plug-in hybrids let you do that) to Google Maps integration for elevation, traffic, and road speeds being able to automatically use the battery at all the spots you’d want it to. I’ve seen many of the smaller reviewers mention that the car’s only great if you have a 40 mile commute, where I’d argue that it only really matters for people that have 40 miles of slow driving for their commute. You could have a 120 mile commute but if 80 of those is at highway speeds you’ll still get a massive savings in gas and travel costs, especially if the slow 40 miles is heavy traffic freeways are under 5 mph average. And it’s funny, Doug rates the practicality for this car lower than all the electric cars, while I would say they are about the same. Yes the middle back seat has the hump, but I’d argue the practicality of eliminating range anxiety completely while having a total range of close to 600 miles when fully charged/gassed is a huge in terms of practicality for people that drive longer distances regularly. Not to say you can’t do that with an electric car, but if you’re doing longer trips multiple times a month it’s not always convenient depending on where you live.
So basically, I think Volvo has had a hard sell of their lineup. Obviously people who actually test drive them or do all the research mostly like them even with their downfalls, but the car lacking a lot of intuitiveness, and the inability to properly inform the consumer why they might want a plug-in hybrid over a pure electric or gas car isn’t something that’s easy to fix. But to date I haven’t watched a single review of this car in the 20 or 30 I’ve watched that actually gets all the features or even regular facts about the car right. Every single one is either missing key information you’d want to know, or outright wrong on core specs, like HP/Torque, 0-60 time, electric range (don’t know how many I’ve seen claim the car only has 35-36 miles of range straight from the spec sheet instead of the 40-41), if it’s still has a supercharger like the older models, etc.
Obviously there’s a lot that Volvo could do in regards to intuitiveness. I mean just brining back the drive mode selector is one thing. Bringing back paddle shifters and using them to allow control over the regenerative breaking levels like the Ioniq 5, and making the levels 1, 2, and one-peddle would lead people to intuitively trying them and discovering that feature, even if I think just having a one-pedal driving mode would be nice too. Adding a “round trip” feature so that when you key in your destination it asks you if you want to add a second destination to return back to your home so you can get the full benefits of the electric range planning that’s already built in.
So really, it’s funny because at some level you can fault reviewers for not being thorough about their review (in Doug’s case, he obviously only had it a few hours) but when every single reviewer is wrong, or missing features, or glossing over important things about the car, I think the problem really has to come back to Volvo at that point. I’ve owned many other cars that went the review cycle, and being interested in cars I’ve obviously watched many reviews, and I’ve honestly never seen as many inaccurate reviews as I have in regards to these newer recharge models. But it’s funny because I haven’t seen nearly any problems with the normal S60s, or any of the other variants, it’s really specific to just the recharge models. And that goes for the whole lineup, all the way up to the XC90.
In the end, I honestly think that Volvo deserves the low rating it got from Doug’s video from a reviewer perspective, the lowest across all of it’s rivals, because it means their decisions to remove thing they think people don’t care about really did come full circle. Though, one thing that Doug got right is what rivals the car actually competes with; I’ve seen so many people that for some reason only want to compare it to gas cars or only electric, but really it competes on both sides. Though I’d say there should be a category comparing it to only other plug-in hybrids, in which case it’d be at the top. As an owner, it saddens me because of how good the car is, and all of these reviews mean less people are going to buy them. I mean just if Doug had found the drive modes, you could look at the other Volvo cars he reviewed (the 2020 V60 and 2019 S60) and see that the car should have a higher acceleration number, which alone would have moved it up a few spots. That with a higher practicality score from being a plug-in hybrid would have put it closer to the middle of this pack.