Volvo V60 Cross Country Review

The Volvo V60 is a posh estate car with a practical interior and loads of safety kit, but what if you want something more rugged?

Step forward the Volvo V60 Cross Country. It’s a Volvo estate, only with four-wheel drive and a 60mm taller ride height, making it an ideal choice if you tow a caravan or occasionally like to get off the beaten track but don’t want the high running costs of a traditional SUV. 

This is still a Volvo so it’s posh inside, spacious and, above all, safer than Fort Knox.

The Volvo V60 Cross Country is itself a trim level on the standard V60 range, but there is plenty of scope to add options. 

We’d advise the Driver Assist Pack, which includes Volvo’s Pilot Assist autonomous driving aids, the Tech Pack which adds Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and the Lounge Pack. It gives you four-zone climate control, a full-length glass roof and a 360-degree camera with auto-park.

In terms of engines, there are two to choose from – a 190PS diesel and a 250PS petrol. The petrol model’s quicker and smoother, but we’d go for the diesel which performs well and is significantly cheaper to run.

The Volvo V60’s only direct rival is the Audi A4 Allroad, which follows the same recipe as the Volvo by adding jacked-up suspension, muscular looks and four-wheel drive to a posh small estate car.

Want something sportier? Then consider an xDrive version of the BMW 3 Series Touring. It’ll be sportier to drive than either the Volvo or the Audi and is available with an excellent choice of engines, though it’s not designed to tackle the soft-roading the Volvo and Audi are capable of.

Another contender is the Subaru Outback which is even more rugged than the Volvo but lacks its classy styling and posh interior feel. There's also the Volkswagen Passat Alltrack.

The Volvo V60 Cross Country feels very posh inside. The huge infotainment screen deals with most of the car’s controls so, where you’d expect to find rows of buttons and knobs, you instead get metal highlights and expensive-looking trim pieces. 

What’s more, it all feels properly screwed together, you won’t suffer any cabin squeaks and the gaps between trims and cabin plastics are consistent.

As well as looking good, it feels nice to the touch. Most of the interior plastics are soft and padded, the air vents move slickly and have cold-to-the-touch metal fittings while the stereo’s volume knob is also metal trimmed. 

Cross Country models are available with a choice of two wood inlays – Linear Lime or Driftwood. They do without the varnish you get on most cars’ interior wood veneers and look more authentic as a result. Meanwhile, the standard leather interior smells great and feels robust.

Cross Country models also get all the fancy lighting you could hope for. Puddle lights illuminate the ground around the car when you get in, all the interior lights are white-shining LEDs and you get pretty mood lighting which bathes the cabin in a colourful glow of your choosing.

The Volvo V60 Cross Country comes as standard with a nine-inch central infotainment screen. Its portrait shape means it looks just like an iPad and operates the same way too, you can swipe to flick through menus and pinch to zoom in on maps. Setting the navigation is as easy as punching in a postcode and the car can route around congestion. 

A three-year subscription to Volvo on Call comes as standard offering you a variety of connected services. Have an accident and your Volvo can call the emergency services, tell them how many people are in the car and the severity of any collision. Need breakdown assistance? Then all you need to do is press the SOS button on the roof-mounted console.

Volvo on Call also adds several convenience features. Using an app on your smartphone you can programme the nav remotely, check remaining fuel and range, and even lock and unlock the car without having to leave the comfort of your living room.

Unfortunately, while you get this fancy kit as standard, you’ll have to pay extra for essentials such as Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. These systems can mirror the display of your smartphone on the car’s big screen, giving you access to maps and also music playback apps such as Audible and Spotify. 

Thankfully, you don’t need to splurge extra cash just to enjoy your music – even the standard stereo has ten speakers and a 220W output, producing robust sound.  

Want to upgrade? Well, you get two options. The first is a Harman Kardon surround-sound system with 13 speakers and a 600W output. The top-of-the-range system comes from Bowers & Wilkins, has 14 speakers and 1100W of amplification power that’s so loud it feels like you’re at the gig, not listening to a recording of it.

There’s no shortage of space in the Volvo’s two front seats and both get electrical adjustment that makes getting your perfect driving position an easy job. Heated front seats are standard but the Cross Country version of the V60 isn’t available with the cooled chairs you can have on luxurious Inscription models.

Getting into the Volvo’s back seat is easy because the rear doors open wide and once you’re in, you won’t find much to complain about in terms of space. There’s plenty for tall adults to sit behind you even if you're tall and there’s no shortage of headroom.

The Volvo’s wide enough to accommodate three adults sitting abreast with plenty of room in the larger footwells and when the middle chair’s not in use, all Cross Country models have a rear-centre armrest with a hidden storage area and a couple of cupholders.

Fitting a child seat is easy because the Volvo has Isofix points fitted to the outer rear seats hidden under plastic covers. The back doors give plenty of room to lift the seat into place and there’s space behind the front seats to manoeuvre it into position. 

Want to ramp up back seat luxury? Then the Climate Pack adds heated outer rear seats – as well as a heated steering wheel and a quick-clear heated windscreen. The Lounge Pack is a pricey option but makes the back seat even plusher by adding a full-length panoramic sunroof and by giving your two rear-seat passengers heater controls. 

It’s so posh you could easily forget that the Cross Country is an accomplished load-lugger. Its hands-free tailgate can be opened simply by swiping your foot under the rear bumper and it reveals a large load opening with no load lip and a flat floor. 

It has a 529-litre capacity making it slightly bigger than the boot you’ll find in an Audi A4 Allroad and plenty big enough to stow away a set of suitcases. Need more space? Then the back seats split 60/40 and fold flat into the floor by yanking a couple of latches right at the front of the boot. With the back seats folded away, you’re left with enough room to fit an adult’s bicycle with both its wheels attached.

Keeping the cabin tidy should be easy, too. The V60 Cross Country has large front door bins, a big glove box, a lidded cubby under the front centre armrest and slightly smaller pockets in the rear doors so there’s somewhere to hide all your clutter.

The Cross Country is available with a choice of two engines – the mild-hybrid petrol B4 and the diesel D4.

It’s the diesel model that’s the best fit in a car like this, providing decent performance in combination with affordable running costs. It’s a 2.0-litre four-cylinder producing 190PS which is enough to get the Volvo from 0-62mph in 8.2 seconds, although the slow-to-respond automatic gearbox dulls performance slightly. 

If you’re looking for a rugged estate with a serious turn of pace then you’ll be better off going for the smooth 3.0-litre diesel version of Audi’s A4 Allroad, which delivers a slug of performance the Volvo can only dream of.

The Cross Country’s B4 mild-hybrid 250PS, 2.0-litre petrol gets from 0-62mph more than a second quicker than the D4 diesel and it’s also a tad smoother and quieter under acceleration. 

It uses a mild-hybrid system to recoup energy under braking and when coasting and can provide a boost of power when you make off from a standstill. Despite all this cleverness, though, it’s still more expensive to run than the diesel model.

The Volvo V60 Cross Country’s petrol engine is quieter and smoother under acceleration than the diesel model, but both engines are quiet once you’ve settled in for a cruise.

Compared to a regular V60, the Cross Country suffers from less road noise because it has thinner tyres with a taller profile than the rest of the range.

Wind noise is also well suppressed, helped by the fact that the Cross Country’s body cuts through the air more efficiently than a boxy SUV, that said an Audi A4 Allroad is noticeably quieter. One option is to specify Volvo’s laminated rear windows that help reduce wind and road noise.

Safety is something Volvo leads the way on so it’s no surprise that the V60 Cross Country comes crammed full of kit over and above what you get in rivals. 

You get everything you’d expect in an expensive estate car including automatic emergency brakes that detect people as well as other cars, lane keep assist and a road sign detection system that can display info like the current speed limit on the car’s infotainment screen. 

But you also get safety features that are unique to Volvo. Run-off Mitigation can steer the car back onto the road if it detects you’re creeping onto the verge. 

And, if that fails, Run-off Protection braces you for impact. It tightens the seatbelts to keep you firmly in your seat as you bump down the side of the road, the airbags are primed and the brake pedal retracts being pushed into the passenger compartment. 

To the long list of standard safety features fitted to the V60, the Cross Country adds headlights that can light up corners and use their full beams in oncoming traffic, headlight washers and heated wipers that won’t freeze to the windscreen in winter.

The V60 Cross Country hasn’t been tested for safety by Euro NCAP but you can expect it to be just as safe as the standard model that was awarded five stars when it was evaluated by Euro NCAP. 

It doesn't matter whether you buy a petrol or diesel-powered version of the Volvo V60 Cross Country, both models qualify for group 35E insurance. 

As a result, they’re slightly more expensive to cover than a comparable Audi A4 Allroad fitted with a 2.0-litre diesel engine (group 26) but cheaper than an A4 Allroad with the more powerful 3.0-litre diesel engine (group 39). 

The Volvo V60 Cross Country was launched in 2019 meaning both the petrol and diesel model pay £870 for the first year of tax and £150 for every year afterwards. Both cars qualify for BIK tax of 37%. 

For reference, the Audi A4 Allroad 190PS 2.0-litre diesel chalks up identical rates. The petrol Allroad is slightly cheaper, costing £540 to tax in the first year and qualifying for 46% BIK. 

The Volvo V60 Cross Country sits close to the top of the V60 range so it comes with lots of standard equipment. The Cross Country’s 60mm raised suspension means it sits higher than the standard model and it also gets a revised lower grille, wheel extensions, a ‘Cross County’ embossed rear bumper and dual exhaust pipes.

You also get additional equipment to the standard model including a leather interior, headlights that shine around corners and dip automatically, hands-free boot opening, headlight washers and driftwood interior trim.

Along with the standard kit, you also get an options list as long as your arm grouped together in various packs. One of the best is the Driver Assist Pack, it costs around £1500 but means the Volvo can drive almost completely autonomously on the motorway.