Thoughts at 3500 miles

I've owned the V60 for two months and driven 3500 miles now. I was hoping to provide some initial thoughts at this point, for anyone who might be interested in buying one.

The reason I chose the V60 was due to its combination of comfort, practicality, relative reliability (compared to its German peers), and value. On those counts it has done very well.

Comfort
The front seats remain incredible. On the highway at 75 mph, road noise can be highly variable. With a decent road surface, the car is quiet and comfortable. However, on rougher pavement, a significant amount of road noise does still get transmitted into the cabin. This past month I've had the privilege of driving a 2017 BMW 530i and a 2017 Porsche Macan, and there remains a significant difference in NVH between the Volvo and those fancier cars. The road noise doesn't become excessive and I never need to turn up the radio more than 1 or 2 clicks to compensate, but it's not library-quiet like a Mercedes C300. I still feel that the BMW 3-series is unacceptably loud with significant wind noise (not to mention subpar materials) and the V60 easily bests it in this regard.

Practicality
Although the V60 is on the smaller side for a wagon, it hits a sweet spot for hauling capacity. The Golf Sportwagen is significantly larger, however (44 ft³ versus 66 ft³). Although there is a big difference between the two, in practice the V60 handles my needs without issue. In particular, I can fit my bulky Surly Crosscheck touring bike with full fenders and racks easily, and the low load floor is extremely helpful when manhandling this heavy bike into the back.

Reliability
Nothing to mention here. Even the oft-maligned infotainment system has been totally reliable. The funny skipping issue with the iPhone interface actually hasn't resurfaced.

Value
This is a interesting one. When I purchased my car ($30,900), the VW Golf Sportwagen 4Motion was just coming out onto the market, and prices hovered in the $25,500 range in my area for the VW. The VW is more modern and has a great interior in its own right, although the seats can't compare to the Volvo. The VW also comes in a manual transmission which is a great benefit. The Volvo is rated at 20/29 while the VW achieves 22/30 so the rated difference is small, although I suspect the VW will have better real-world mileage with its 170 hp 1.8 liter turbocharged engine (edit - the VW seems to have been revised upward to 22/32). In my area dealerships are not discounting the VW yet, but I suspect it will be only a matter of time before a manual Sportwagen 4Motion can be had for $22-23,000, and that makes the Volvo seem like a significantly poorer value. The more premium German competition such as the BMW 328i xDrive Sports Wagon and the Audi A4 Allroad remain much pricier, and Mercedes is still M.I.A. in this market segment.

Nitpicks
I've really had very few nitpicks with this car. Gas mileage has been decent, but not mind-blowing. I certainly haven't approached the 29 mpg highway rating. My average still hovers around 23 mpg and premium fuel seems to have made zero difference in economy. I have a few more tanks to go, and I'll update this blog with my 87 vs 93 octane testing.

BLIS is a must-have on this vehicle. The B-pillars are simply too large and are positioned just behind my head in the 8 o'clock position, interfering with manual blind spot checks. That's a major problem in my book, because driver aids should never be required to make up for shortcomings of the car.

The navigation is effective, but its directions in busy urban areas can be incomplete. For example, in some cases it might tell you to turn right or exit in some distance, but fail to mention the road/exit name. In other cases, particularly with complex junctions, the rudimentary directions don't give you a good enough idea of which road to take. This is compounded by the fact that the "next turn" is displayed in a tiny corner of the screen and isn't visually evident at first glance.

Well, that's it! I hope my rambling thoughts are helpful to someone out there considering this car. I've been very pleased with it so far and I'm looking forward to more road trips as the weather warms up.

Blending right in

This is just the usual scene at our local grocery co-op. If you've got CSI enhance skills, you can even spot a V60CC in the back right corner and what looks to be an old 240 in the distance. I didn't even realize the 240 was there until I looked at the photo on my computer.

There are also 3 Subarus in this photo. See if you can find them all.

Winter tire users rejoice - no TPMS

I had a pleasant surprise with the V60 when I took delivery of the car and installed my winter wheel set. Like many New Englanders, I have a separate set of wheels with winter tires mounted, specifically Dunlop SP Winter Sport 3Ds. All of my previous cars have had a tire pressure monitoring  system (TPMS) in place. This is a nice little feature when driving with stock tires, but I typically don't waste my money on a separate set of sensors for winter. They can cost $30-50 per wheel, like these here. For 6 months out of the year, I would simply put up with the TPMS warning light on my dash.

No such warning light occurred after I installed my winter wheels and tires onto the V60. Curious to know why, I delved into the owner's manual and discovered the following:

The V60 can have a regular TPMS system, or the confusingly-named Tire Monitor (I'll call it TM for short). There's no outward clue on the car, to my knowledge, as to which system you have. How do you check? Go into the My Car menu --> Settings --> Car Settings. If you have an entry called Tire Pressure, sucks for you! You have TPMS and you must now suffer the warning light in wintertime, or pay out the nose for a separate set of sensors, or pay out the nose to have a tire shop swap your tires twice per year, or move to Florida, or crash and die on your all-season tires (and pay out the nose in medical/funeral bills). If you have an entry called Tire Monitoring, congrats! You have TM and you will suffer none of those indignities.

TM must be calibrated with the tires at their correct pressures to begin with. You can do this in the settings menu. It will then use the ABS sensors to track the rotational speed of the tires individually. If one tire becomes low, its diameter becomes smaller, and thus will rotate faster - the ABS system senses this, and warns the user that a tire might be low on pressure. It can determine which tire is low to some degree, but not with pinpoint accuracy, since it's indirectly measuring pressure.

The benefit of this whole thing is that cold-weather drivers who use TM don't have to suffer an annoying warning light on their dash for the entire winter. Or move to Florida. Thank goodness.