All Cars, All the Time

Volvo S80









A coworker of mine bought a used S80. He was a pretty wild driver--he almost hit me a couple of times in the employee parking lot. Anyway, he gets rear ended and the S80 totaled (somehow his accidents were never his fault, but he sure had a lot of them). He was impressed with the way the car protected him in the crash, so he bought another used S80. Then he took a job somewhere else and I never heard from him again. Well, that's my little segue into the new S80. This S80 really looks to be a refinement of the previous design with a little S40 thrown into the mix. Generally when a model’s styling is “fine tuned” like this it means that the model has been selling well and they don’t want to rock the boat. However this conservative approach doesn’t always work, for example Volvo’s sister, Jaguar, is having a tough time moving the XJ for this very reason. The S80 now has the Yamaha engineered V8 from the XC90 as an option and the V8 can be had with all wheel drive. On the interior I like the “floating” center console and walnut trim, but I'm not digging the steering wheel trimmed in walnut all the way around—several manufacturers are doing this and it just doesn’t look right to me. I think that the all wood trim wheel looks like you went to Pep Boys and bought a "wood" cover. I much prefer the wood to be on the top and bottom and have leather on the sides. The S80 platform will also spawn the Lincoln “Mark S” that is supposedly coming to town in production form in the next couple of years.