SA Roadtests
South Africa
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This is the home of automobile road tests in South Africa. We drive South African cars, SUVs and LCVs under South African conditions. It also just happens that most of the vehicles we drive are world cars as well, so what you read here probably applies to the models you can get at home.
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Published in The Witness Motoring on Wednesday February 22, 2012
Volvo AB is confident that fans of other makes will put blinkers aside to consider the S60 as a viable alternative. So confident, in fact, that they forecast 30 percent of sales will be won from other brands. It’s extremely well made, it performs, it handles and it’s safe. You already know that, but the company has just announced that its S60 was named top achiever in 2011 EuroNCAP testing in the Large Family Car category. It also walked away with 5 stars each in all three American NHTSA categories – frontal, side pole and side barrier collision testing - and was an IIHS Top Safety Pick.
When the S60 was introduced in 2010, it was described as the most dynamic car Volvo had ever produced. Stefan Sällqvist, chief chassis engineer on the project said: "Words cannot do the driving properties justice. You have to drive the car to understand what it's about. Preferably on a narrow winding country road where every sweeping bend brings a new challenge … we have matched our technical solutions with the very best competitors to verify that we have truly made it to the top,"
That car was offered with a choice of two chassis’. We got the dynamic version here in South Africa. We described it then as “firm and solid, not as exciting as some perhaps, but comforting. It isn't as intense an experience as in the Quattro, for example, but probably more companionable in the long term. Driving the car in normal mode with the six-speed Geartronic, it is civilised and very Volvo. Slip into sport mode, however, and your nice polite Swede adopts a harder and more urgent persona. Reactions seem sharper and the engine growls a bit. Dare we say it? It seems almost rude by comparison with its usual genteel self.”
Last March, Sällqvist and his team made it even better. “The challenge was to boost the dynamics without making the chassis feel raw. If the chassis is too firm, even smooth tarmac can feel bumpy. We wanted a distinct yet plush feel," he said. They braced the front suspension towers and added monotube dampers. These feature compression and return damping via the same valve, giving shorter, faster fluid flow, which in turn means the damper responds more quickly. The higher operating speed takes care of any initial roll tendency sometimes felt just as you turn the steering wheel. “It's an effective way to improve response and the connected feel," he continued.
Front and rear springs were shortened by 15 mm and made 15 percent stiffer to make the car easier to control and reduce any tendency to lurch. It is an area that, says Sällqvist, requires true fingertip sensitivity in order to find the right blend of dynamics and comfort. Then they stiffened the bushings that attach the rear dampers to the body in order to counteract oscillation and roll and added Corner Traction Control that uses torque vectoring to make for smoother cornering.
Here’s where we speak of proof, pudding and eating: We are not engineers with access to fancy test equipment, or racing drivers with a personal track in the back yard. We're just ordinary motorheads with lots of driving experience and, hopefully, some common sense. Our impression was that this S60 was firm, yet comfortable. It had decent steering feel and feedback. There was none of the intensity of ride and woodenness of steering found in Teutonic devices developed to trim microseconds off lap times at the ‘Ring. It’s a car that was built to be enjoyed, yet is livable day-to-day. If you’re spending half-a-mil, do you want to bore your golfing buddies with microseconds on racetracks or smugly know that you have a very nice car?
Update: We received an email from the PR person at Volvo Cars SA recently. The company has listened and given local S60 buyers their spare wheels back – little pumps and white gooey stuff are history. Thought you might like to know.
The numbers
Price: R501 500
Engine: 2953 cc, 24-valve, inline six-cylinder, turbopetrol
Power: 224 kW at 5600 rpm
Torque: 440 Nm between 2100 and 4200 rpm
Zero to 100 km/h: 6,1 seconds
Maximum speed: Governed to 250 km/h
Real life fuel consumption: About 11,9 l/100 km
Tank: 70 litres
Maintenance plan: 5 years/100 000 km
This is a one-man show, which means that road test cars entrusted to me are driven only by me. Some reviewers hand test cars over to their partners to use as day-to-day transport and barely experience them for themselves.
What this means to you is that every car reviewed is given my own personal evaluation and receives my own seat of the pants judgement - no second hand input here.
Every car goes through real world testing; on city streets littered with potholes, speed bumps and rumble strips, on freeways and if its profile demands, dirt roads as well.
My articles appear every Wednesday in the motoring pages of The Witness, South Africa's oldest continuously running newspaper, and occasionally on Saturdays in Weekend Witness as well. I drive eight to ten vehicles most months of the year (press cars are withdrawn over the festive season - wonder why?) so not everything gets published in the paper. Those that are, get a tagline but the rest is virgin, unpublished and unedited by the political-correctness police. Hope you like what you see, because there are no commercial interests at work here. As quite a few readers have found, I answer every serious enquiry from my home email address, with my phone numbers attached, so I do actually exist.
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SA Roadtests
South Africa
ctjag8