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Aside from the S60 Cross Country, Volvo also introduced the S60 Inscription to the world during the 2015 Detroit Auto Show, while the XC90 R-Design made its North American debut.
The S60 Inscription’s selling point is rear legroom, which Volvo hopes will be class-leading with the sedan. The S60 will be assembled at its facility in Chengdu, China, with exports to the United States set for this summer.
The XC90 R-Design ups the ante on the new XC90, with a range of Drive-E engines delivering up to 400 horsepower to the road through either 20-inch or optional 22-inch R-Design alloys. The XC90 will also arrive in U.S. showrooms alongside the S60 Inspiration and and Cross Country this summer.
16 Comments on “NAIAS 2015: Volvo S60 Inscription, XC90 R-Design Revealed...”
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And with this post, my duties in covering the 2015 Detroit Auto Show are complete. Thank you all for keeping up with me for the past three days. Let’s do it again sometime!
See you all Thursday morning. :)
Thank God. Enough concept monstrosities, bro-dozers and race cars. But the Santa Cruz is way cool.
Rest well, you deserve it.
Well put, the Volvos weren’t the most exciting of the bunch but at least they were visually honest.
Less antiseptic than AutoBlog, more adult than Jalopnik. Thanks for the memories.
More rear legroom would be a welcome improvement.
They risk becoming Mini with all the available permutations available from a low-volume mfr. The ‘Inscription’ should become the standard S60 offering.
Inscription?! Where do I sign up??!!
Seriously, though, a Chinese car with a Volvo grille is not a genuine Volvo.
The real thing is solidly made with German, Dutch, French and Scandinavian parts.
What we see here, I’m afraid, will show itself to be the equivalent of a Rolex purchased off an outdoor market table in Hong Kong.
“The real thing is solidly made with German, Dutch, French and Scandinavian parts.”
Don’t forget the Japanese transmissions, nor the American Dana 30 rear axles, pretty crazy how many different countries and manufacturers were involved with the good ol’ Volvos.
Your high quality smartphone was made in China. The S60 inscription made in Chengdu is made with German, Dutch, French, Japanese, Chinese and Scandinavian parts. It is just as solidly made as its brethren are in Ghent, Belgium. Time will tell.
The first made in China car imported to the USA. The witness of this event is something all of us can later tell our grandchildren (or great gandchildren) about. For sure, there will be some growing pains in regard to their quality control processes. Hopefully the Swedes have done their part to instill their safety mindedness into the Chinese manufacturing processes at the plant that makes the Inscription. Hopefully judicious use has been made of robots and programmable machines to perform the critical safety related manufacturing processes (to keep people as much as possible out of the equation since the admission of quality mistakes does not come easily given the culture). Hopefully the Chinese suppliers of the parts for the vehicles manufactured at the Inscription plant are following along the same line of thought. Volvo customers take their safety and the safety of their families very seriously. It practically goes without needing to be said that even a single safety mishap or significant safety related recall with this new vehicle will likely cause Volvo customers to lose confidence in their product.
Allow me to go out on a limb…
If Geely expects to get its money back from its investment in Volvo, it *must* offer vehicles that are even better than those coming from Sweden. I seriously doubt that the people who run Geely are stupid. They are clearly playing a long game. High quality Chinese-made Volvos would, very quickly, change perceptions and open the door to the mass-market brand product sales outside China that they so clearly want. Selling Volvos is merely a means to an end.
The question is, can they do it? I guess we’re about to find out.
Might want to check the Chinese suppliers and their parts for any GM vehicles too. I wonder what percentage of American cars on U.S. roads have significant Chinese parts and are also depending on Chinese manufacturing processes?
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-05-27/that-car-war-with-china-u-s-already-lost
“Equally important: Below the car-maker level, the U.S. auto-supplier system has already been largely hollowed out by Chinese competition. As the overall U.S. vehicle trade deficit has grown from $100 million in 2004 to $5.3 billion in 2013, the gap in auto-parts gap has also ballooned: from $3.2 billion in 2004 to $10.5 billion last year. The flow of Chinese parts to the U.S. has grown by 700 percent in the last decade. Truth be told, the vehicles we are shipping to China are likely made with so many Chinese-sourced parts, we shouldn’t call them exports so much as returns.”
Yikes.
You see Cadillac what you started?! Now everyone wants to “come with length.”
They may have started the joke but I don’t think they started the trend of building cars in a midsize coupe package and then tossing rear doors on it to call it a “sedan”. Maybe this kind of nonsense works on plebmobiles such as Civic, old Corolla, Cruze etc, but in a semi-premium segment it shouldn’t be tolerated. Looks like some OEMs get the message and are adding a few inches of legroom in a pale attempt to correct the problem.
Re: XC 90…
Hey look everyone, VW finally got a midsize CUV!
What do you mean “it’s a Volvo”?
About the S60-Indecision (or whatever): I don’t get it. If someone wants a Volvo sedan a little longer than the S60 — isn’t that what the S80 is for?
About the XC90: Wow, finally! Just cut out the wheelhouse arches a bit upwards and pad them a bit inwards from the front and rear, so they won’t look too ridiculously empty when you put some not-so-ludicrously Conestoga-wagon-sized rims on it, so you can lower it some six inches — and ta-daa, the 245 is reborn.