Volvo’s 90th birthday falls on the month of the New York auto show, just days away from opening, and the Swedish marque will use the show to introduce the all-new XC60 to North America after its debut at the Geneva motor show earlier this year.
The completely redesigned XC60 will go on sale in the U.S. in late summer, and ahead of its New York appearance, Volvo has detailed the engines that it will offer stateside. In T5 guise, the XC60 will use a turbocharged four-cylinder engine producing 250 hp, while the T6 flavor will offer a turbocharged and supercharged unit good for 316 hp. Volvo plans to offer a range-topping hybrid powerplant on top of those two as well, in the form of the plug-in gasoline-electric T8 unit good for 400 hp.
That’ll be a pretty big leap over the engines offered in the outgoing XC60, which has been on the shelf a little too long. Volvo will also offer a diesel version of the XC60 in other markets ranging in output from 190 to 235 hp, but we won’t see them here, despite diesel making an unlikely comeback in the lineups of some European marques.
The range-topping XC60 powerplant will be the T8 hybrid with 400 hp on tap.
Volvo has revamped more than just the engines in the XC60: The new SUV will be longer and wider than the outgoing model and a little shorter in height. But it will still be the biggest model in its class, Volvo says, while staying around the same curb weight as its predecessor despite the use of aluminum and hot-formed boron steel in its construction. The basic packaging is staying the same — no reason to mess with success — though the long span of time between the debut of its predecessor and the debut of the 2018 model means plenty of new safety tech including automatic steering in pre-collision situations, lane drift avoidance and a blind-spot collision avoidance system that will intervene if the driver attempts to change lanes when there is another vehicle in the XC60’s blind spot. In addition, the XC60 will offer the semi-autonomous Pilot Assist feature, which will be able to automatically steer and brake when the vehicle is crawling through traffic jams, as well as at highway speeds. Pilot Assist has already appeared in other recent Volvo vehicles, including the XC90 and the S90/V90 duo.
“We have high expectations for this car,” Volvo CEO Hakan Samuelsson told reporters from Automotive News on the eve of the Geneva show. “This car is a very important element of our future growth plan and for our profitability.”
Pricing for the new XC60 is expected to be announced closer to the start of sales this summer.