Gadgetory

when Volvo set out to try and steal the best customers away from the a4 in the free series they didn't screw around this decidedly handsome beast is perhaps the most mind-changing Volvo yet let's drive the 2012 s60 t6 R and check the tech the s60 shares a platform with the xc60 crossover but you'd never know it by looking at them this sedan has none of Volvo's traditional chunky shoe appeal nor the goofy trying to hard thing of the more modern c30 coupe got a handsome although they've got a distinct and really very elegant and handsome cabin language now they've really pulled it together very subtly fared in things like their vents and their bezels this control panel is very Volvo it ties into that what seven-inch high-res LCD and what you've got here is a series of knobs not a central controller like a lot of companies use the key thing is this is a rotating selector with an okay or select button on top and an exit or back button on the lower half of this guy it also doubles as a tuner when you're in Radio now let's get to what you can see on the screen here's our navigation optional navigation by the way and like everything on this screen really fine dot pitch I've got all the PIO eyes showing right now you have real-time traffic on this guy let's go to the media system here's your optical slot CD or DVD because we have the top-end media system which has Dolby Pro Logic and handles DVDs down here your control system brings you to the media tab disc is this slot of course rotate this to USB there's my USB and iPod connector bluetooth is streaming Bluetooth a2dp of course you also have Bluetooth hands-free as well and a good old-fashioned aux jack right in here right next to the USB guide and since every car makers teaming up with some robb report style home audio brand these guys have teamed up with odyssey they've got a system in here with I believe 12 speakers five amps at 130 watts each as I mentioned Dolby Pro Logic decoding and what they call multi EQ which is a advanced DSP system that Tunes out all the distortions and weirdnesses of this cars particular cabin although I don't find any mention of there being active noise cancellation cameras this car is optioned up with the camera in the rear which is pretty standard stuff you have two views useful and useless which is just a little bit of a crop and push on the existing via a lot of carmakers are doing that now it's basically a gimmick but you do in the main view have trajectory and these kind of silly dotted lines I don't know if those dotted lines mean I prefer the red green yellow or something like that I guess I look in the manual it's going to tell me every dotted line is six inches or something but I don't need to memorize that math give me regions that say don't go here now as this is a Volvo there's a slew of tech to keep you from running into or over anyone standard is city safety which keeps you from rear-ending someone in stop-and-go traffic we've tried it it works optional is the blind spot information system adaptive cruise control lane departure warning and the related distance alert to prevent rear Enders in other situations then there's collision warning technology with pedestrian detection which can actually detect a pedestrian when you're texting or whatever and apply up to 100% of the brakes to keep you from running them over an industry-first from Volvo one choice on the gearbox here which is this a gear tronic six-speed automatic a true automatic not a CVT as you can see it's got a pretty traditional gate and then you've got your shiftable gate over here no paddles though now let's go see what feeds into that now the r-spec on this car is the same engine layout 3 litre inline-six turbocharged sitting like this but they've revised it with different timing on spark and advance and combustion and they've also gone through and they kind of ported and free flowed the engine so you get a much better breathing mill which takes you to 325 horsepower 354 foot-pounds of torque and it gets this guy up to sixty about a half a second faster around five and a half while still delivering 1826 mpg and again both models are all-wheel drive that we're talking about here and both go out to that same 6-speed automatic which we will now go find out how well it works first of all in everyday city driving how's the power delivery of this turbo it's actually quite good around town very tractable in that sense I don't get the determination or the feeling that it's having to think to apply boost and that's good because when you feel a turbo in town you've got a disaster on your hands we'll see how it is more on the open road now let's try adjusting the steering force there's this menu here for steering wheel force I have three settings low medium high let me see alright so how I should give me a higher weighting dramatically more than low letzte nice smooth sounding engine not quite in the Audi realm of smoothness but that's the benchmark anyway so it's not bad to be even close to that it's quite comfortable in town firm seats but good overall Mergen omits and a lot of good room in this car by the way plenty of headroom for me ok now I've got some open road let's set this car up for it's more athletic handling and that's really just two things pop it over here in the gate I don't want to manually ship it I mean it's an automatic for crying out loud you do your job but I'll put it in the manual gate you see that puts me in sport mode right there so it's going to shift and hold rpms a little more aggressively and then I'm going to dial in this steering light I did already while I was stopped into high force which is the least assist should give me a little better feedback and a little less oversteer on my part now leaving this car in the sports side of the automatic gate you start to feel that it's an automatic more so than we did we were around town it's less suited to what I'm trying to do here which is drive a little more spiritedly and here's where it still seeks a top gear too much it's someone to yank itself out of what I think is like fourth or fifth at a speed where I'd rather have it in second or third so that's an argument to get into the shift gate which of course you can but the power on this car is really quite linear once it comes on it has that sort of turbo times overly high gear thing we get in a lot of cars these days but once it comes on it's a nice broad torque curve out of that turbo which not all of them are and that's a benefit of having a big engine suspension I'm not impressed with I'm getting plenty a little you know yo hop as I go around this choppy sort of Road it's got a lot of twists and turns in it this is where that adaptive 4c suspension that is optional might be nice okay let's price this s60 t6 in this case it's an R but a t6 without the R package starts off with 38:8 then they get to an R model which is a different model you're gonna pay about forty six hundred dollars more and that's going to roll in the hotter motor the 4c active suspension bigger wheels the are body kit moonroof and those dual xenon headlights the multimedia package is the high-end audio the navigations included as is a rear camera twenty seven hundred bucks I might go for that the tech package gets you all that adaptive cruise Lane Departure distance alert and the thing that will stop you before you whack a pedestrian for twenty one hundred bucks and the one that I blow off without even thinking about it is the rear seat entertainment option for eighteen hundred it's a hokey old dual screen dual DVD that you could have bought at Kmart and oak road to your seats bye-bye