New luxury car from Swedish stalwart conjures up fond memories of a bygone age
The Volvo S90 majors on calm, style, and relaxed comfort, writes Alexander Parker
When I was growing up in Germany, my parents, like many middle-class people with schoolgoing kids at the time, bought a Volvo 740 estate. Styled with a ruler and given the aerodynamic once-over by the same team that gave the world the USS Nimitz, it was a vast and boxy thing on the outside, which meant it was cavernous and comfortable on the inside — a family car loved by us all, including the border collie. For me, Volvo has always had happy associations of family and long road trips across the European continent, from the Algarve to the York moors. If evidence of my life-long addiction to petrol is ever required, I can distinctly remember nagging my poor mother to test-drive a new Volvo 850 T5 Estate, the car Volvo entered into British Touring Car Championship. I remember that day well. Not long after that happy era, AB Volvo sold Volvo Cars to Ford. For 10 years, Volvo seemed to suffer interference with the brand and, critically, in the engineering of its cars. Then, after Ford r...
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