Volvo EX90 Twin Motor AWD Performance



Despite the emergence of its all-electric spin-off brand Polestar, and the full electrification of existing models like the XC40 and its C40 spin-off, Swedish brand Volvo is now accelerating into an all-electric era. This has already begun with the EX30, but now here comes the grandiose EX90 to take over flagship duties for the manufacturer's entire range of products. Introducing us to the brain-frying concept of a six-figure Volvo, is the EX90 - an electric analogue of the long-serving and brilliant XC90 - worth such an exorbitant asking price?

Test Car Specifications

Model: 2025 Volvo EX90 Twin Motor Performance Ultra
Price: EX90 from £96,255, Performance Ultra as tested £100,555
Motor: dual 380kW electric motors
Battery: 111kWh lithium-ion (net, 107kWh usable)
Transmission: single-speed reduction-gear automatic, all-wheel drive
Power: 517hp
Torque: 910Nm
Emissions: 0g/km
Range: up to 374 miles
0-62mph: 4.9 seconds
Top speed: 112mph (limited)
Boot space: 310 litres all seven seats in use, 655 litres five seats in use (both figures up to window line), 1,915 litres two seats in use (loaded up to roof)
Kerb weight: 2,787kg

Styling

Looking a lot like a smoothed-off XC90, the EX90 is certainly not unattractive. It has its own distinctive designs of LED head- and taillight clusters, the former distinguished by funky pixellated 'Thor hammer' daytime running lamps in which the centre sections can drop away via means of a clever system, used to reveal the main illumination behind. There's no need for a radiator grille up front either, which makes the Volvo 'Ironmark' appear all the more prominent, and in general it's a good-looking creation.

Which makes the designers' decision to mount the lidar gear on the roof all the more bizarre. There's no polite way of saying this: if you buy an EX90, we guarantee you that you're going to have to spend a good portion of your time batting away comments and jokes about your £100,000 SUV looking like a taxi with its 'For Hire' light out. It's just a really odd choice to make - surely the lidar sensors could have been better integrated somewhere else on the car? The result is that your eye keeps getting drawn to the incongruous lump on the front of the EX90's roof, rather than concentrating on how sleek the rest of it looks.

Oh, finally... the solitary distinguishing feature of a Performance compared to a regular Twin Motor AWD EX90 appears to be that white square next to the model signifier on the bootlid. Subtle.

Interior

When it comes to the fit and finish, and general ambience, of the EX90's interior, there's little to gripe about. Volvo has gone all-in on elegant Scandinavian minimalism, including exquisite wood (which is boldly illuminated at night), the comfiest seats in the entire industry (still are, always will be) and a general air of sophistication that is often missing in modern, tech-heavy cabins.

So that's the good stuff. But then, you'll notice that to achieve said minimalism, there's hardly any switchgear on the Volvo's fascia at all. In fact, in terms of physical buttons and dials, there's a rotary volume/play/pause item on the tunnel, a pair of column stalks - one of which is the gear-shifter - and some controls on the steering wheel. And that's it. Everything, everything else is run through the 14.5-inch Google-powered central touchscreen. The climate controls (which are at least easily accessible on the display's home menu). The vehicle settings (it's about six taps and swipe just to change the steering weight and/or suspension firmness). The way you adjust the exterior mirrors and the head-up display using the steering wheel (this is most vexing). Even the exterior lights (bonkers).

Volvo has improved the human-machine interface from the much-maligned set-up in the EX30, because there's at least that aforementioned driver's head-up display plus a little eight-inch screen on the EX90's steering column for the display of essential information, like road speed, which there isn't in the smaller crossover-SUV, but the fact of the matter is that much of this new electric seven-seat machine's hardware is just frustrating to use on the move. It's nowhere near as intuitive to operate and fine-tune various settings on the EX90 as it is in the related XC90. And that's nearly ten years old, let us remind you.

Quite beyond all the stuff that is now bafflingly sequestered several layers deep in the central display, even the Volvo's solitary column stalk is an annoyance, because it has to handle all of the front wiper, rear wiper, indicator and main beam functions. This means the end button on the stalk has been split into two, with the top half managing the front-screen wash-wipe - you tap it for a mist single-wipe function, or press and hold it to squirt the jets. You have to rotate a sleeve just inside to get the front wipers to work, then the rear wiper operates on a similar system with the bottom half of the end button, and in the end you apply just a minimal amount of incorrect pressure to the stalk in your efforts to remember which bit of the button you're supposed to be pressing because it's not natural to use in the slightest, and so you either indicate left or right needlessly, or instead errantly flash the car in front. Why, Volvo? WHY?!

Practicality

We can't really complain about the EX90's practicality. Like the XC90, there's loads of room onboard for five people to get comfortable, while the third row of seats could accommodate adults for short periods, as long as they're not much more than five-foot-ten tall. All of the seats are individually configurable and adjustable, and one thing the Volvo gets really right is the boot space, because even with all its seats in use there's a usable volume back there. Officially, it's 310 litres up to the window line, which is decent capacity on a seven-seat SUV like this, achieved mercifully without the EX90 having a gigantic rear overhang on the outside.

Performance

Volvo is launching the EX90 in its upper-end Twin Motor formats first of all, with only a luxurious Ultra specification to go at. This means you either choose the 408hp/770Nm Twin Motor AWD, capable of a 5.9-second 0-62mph time, or you opt for the Performance, which ups the outputs to 517hp/910Nm to trim the benchmark sprint by a full second to 4.9 seconds on paper. Both models are, as per Volvo's safety effort, limited to an essentially nominal 112mph top speed.

And both these dual-motor AWD EX90s have a colossal 111kWh battery pack, of which 107kWh is usable. Great for range, ostensibly, but also resulting in two whopping kerb weights: the 'regular' Twin Motor AWD comes in at 2,779kg, the Performance is another nine kilos portlier at 2,787kg.

This, in turn, leads to on-road performance which is rather ho-hum, if we're honest. In our Performance test car, all we can say is 910Nm has never felt so blunt. Even if you find the little Performance button on the screen that puts the Volvo into its fiercest power mode, at no point is the acceleration ever head-snapping. It's sure and swift, and throttle response is at least nicely calibrated, but the EX90 never feels quite as quick as the dramatic on-paper numbers suggest. An XC90 T8 PHEV feels like it has considerably more venom to it... because it's nigh-on 600kg lighter on its feet. That's an astonishing bulk gap, in all honesty.

Of course, big family-moving SUVs don't necessarily need to have supercar straight-line pace, and all the usual EV benefits - smooth power delivery, 'click-it-into-D-and-forget-about-it' drive, and impressive rolling refinement due to minimal powertrain vibrations - are available to the EX90. It is also perfectly strong enough for mid-range acceleration, which is much more pertinent to the typical end-users of this sort of vehicle than 0-62mph times. But something else the two new EX90 models share is the claimed range. Despite the extra potency of the Performance, Volvo says both will go up to 374 miles on a single charge of their battery pack, with a quickest charging rate of 250kW DC putting a 10-80 per cent top-up into the EX90 in just half-an-hour.

Which makes it even more alarming that we got into a non-Performance version in the morning of our test drive with an indicated 80 per cent charge in its battery, and while the conditions outside were cool (December in the UK, but by no means freezing) the maximum range the SUV's computer reckoned it could do on that amount of power was 160 miles. It then turned in a so-so 2.8 miles/kWh during a reasonably steady 60-mile test drive. Later in the same day, on a shorter route with slower roads on it, the Performance only achieved 2.4 miles/kWh. That's not good enough, frankly.

Obviously, any talk of economy on a single drive is, in some ways, pointless, as it'll be nigh-on impossible to replicate exactly the same returns (you'd need to be on the same route in the same traffic conditions in the same weather in the same ambient temperature with precisely the same driving style), but what we experienced surely gives an indication that never mind 374 miles, even 300 is going to be hard to hit in any EX90 Twin Motor. Indeed, 2.4 miles/kWh on 107kWh would be 257 miles; 80 per cent of that (which is what most people charge to on public connections) drops it to 205 miles. That's just 55 per cent of Volvo's claimed WLTP figure. Eek.

Ride & Handling

Again, it's something of a mixed bag here with the Volvo EX90. It runs on four-corner electronically controlled air suspension with adaptive dampers, and in terms of comfort the secondary ride is nice and smooth and sumptuous. The primary ride is pretty good also, but there are times when the goliath 22-inch alloys are painfully evident, as they can infrequently send muffled thumps through the Volvo's superstructure. The company is proud to say that the EX90 has the quietest cabin (when the vehicle is travelling at speed) of any of its products, and there's little doubt the isolation of both tyre and wind noise is magnificent, but it's a shame those wheels intrude on the peace, serenity and comfort on occasion. It's a classic case of providing giant alloys to satisfy punters (and maybe chief car designers...) who want such things, but then not quite setting the dampers up to be able to cope with such a vast amount of unsprung mass.

Then there's the handling. Which we're less than impressed by. The EX90 can feel a bit wobbly, especially if you ask it to perform a quick change of direction, with a brief but disconcerting sense that the shell is somehow disconnected from the chassis as its suspension loads up. It's not terrible, and excessive body roll is beautifully quelled in the main, but the way the Volvo initially moves from side to side doesn't encourage any particularly spirited cornering. Nor does the kerb weight, in truth, which is all-pervasive.

And then, on top of all this, once you've dug down far enough into that central touchscreen, you can switch both the suspension and steering from soft to firm if you want. Don't bother: the firm steering setting is oddly hyperactive, responding near-instantaneously and a little aggressively to even minute shifts in steering-wheel angle. Coupled with the roll moment the EX90 exhibits during sharp alterations of direction, it can lead to an oddly unpleasant cornering experience in the Volvo.

Value

More affordable variants of the Volvo EX90 will be along presently, such as single-motor models and lesser trim specifications too, like Pure and Core. But that's of little comfort when you're staring down the barrel of the cheapest version costing the wrong side of 96 grand, and a Performance like our test car coming in at an eye-watering £100,555. Obviously, as Ultra-grade cars, these EX90s come with everything fitted as standard, up to and including a head-up display in the windscreen, automatic pixel LED headlights with active high beam, a 360-degree surround-view camera system with 3D view, a fixed panoramic sunroof, four-zone climate control, heating elements for all of the steering wheel and four of the seven seats, keyless entry and go, a wireless smartphone charging pad, and then - the centrepiece - a stunning 25-speaker Bowers & Wilkins Dolby Atmos surround-sound system. That's aside from the four-corner air suspension, 14.5-inch Google infotainment and eight-inch driver display we've already mentioned, but you still have to square off 'six-figure Volvo' in your head if you're going to be content with this aspect of the EX90.

Verdict

Let's be clear, we are big fans of Geely-era Volvo. Since that oft-mentioned second-generation XC90 came into being in 2015, we've been delighted by pretty much every model the company has put out in the interim. But, sadly, for all its top-end posturing, the new EX90 is not one of the Swedish company's greatest hits. There's much to like here, such as its (largely) smooth ride, the spacious, beautifully built and ultra-quiet interior, and the slick benefits an electric vehicle can bring to the party; enough that we're keen to see how future models of the seven-seat, zero-emission SUV stack up.

But given its infuriating human-machine interface, the modest real-world range returns we experienced on this first drive, and a few dynamic question marks regarding the big wheels, the average handling and the weird steering, we're not blown away by the EX90... which perhaps wouldn't be so bad, were it not for the fact it costs one hundred thousand pounds. And we can't help but come to the conclusion that for all its environment-satisfying EV status, as a luxury, seven-seat SUV, the EX90 is comprehensively outmanoeuvred by its much older XC90 relation in several crucial regards.