Volvo raised the floor and lowered the roof when designing the ES90, and the result is a fast-back electric sedan with touches of SUV.
The Swedish automaker recently gave us a look at the five-seat midsize ES 90’s impressive tech, but saved the actual global intro of its sixth all-electric model until now.
What it has revealed is a slightly raised sedan with a sloped roofline and hatchback-like access to the cargo area. It’s not a new idea, BMW calls its version, the X6, a “coupe SUV,” and Acura reintroduced its ZDX nameplate last year as an all-electric coupe-ish SUV.
Volvo’s take is a more car than SUV – there’s a lot of resemblance to the Polestar 2 in its looks, although the ES90 is larger and a little curvier. (Polestar is an all-EV spinoff from Volvo and the Polestar 2 was based on a Volvo concept design. China’s Geely Holding Group is a part-owner of both companies.)
The ES90 shares its underpinnings with Volvo’s popular EX90 midsize electric SUV but has a new 800-volt electrical architecture which allows for quicker battery top ups at DC fast-charge stations.
Vovlo already sells the ES90 throughout Europe and will be selling in the U.S. but hasn’t said when. That mean that U.S. pricing, is still up in the air, but we expect it to start in the mid $70,000s. Volvo has said it likely will be built in chna, which will make it ineligible for a federal clean vehicle incentive for buyers in the U.S. (Leased vehicles are exempt from the incentives’ assembled-in-North-America restriction.)
Safety First
Safety is a Volvo hallmark,and the ES90 doesn’t disappoint. It comes loaded with advanced safety and driver assist features, and an impressive array of roof-mounted sensors to feed them real-time info. Those sensors – a dozen ultrasonic sensors, one lidar and five radar units, and seven cameras – are housed beneath a small bulge in the roofline above the center of the windshield. There’s also an interior radar unit that keeps track of movement inside the car and can issue an audible alert if the driver tries to lock someone in the back seat.
The ES90 is a new model so hasn’t yet been crash-tested by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (and, under the Trump Administration’s drive to slash government, may never be) or the nonprofit Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. But Volvos invariably do very well in those tests and we expect the ES90 will keep up that tradition.
Powertrain, Performance, Battery and Charging
The ES90 will offer a trio of powertrain choices: a single motor rear-drive version with 333 horsepower, and two dual-motor all-wheel drive versions, one rated at 449 hp and the other a high-performance variant boasting 680 hp and a 3.9-second 0-60 sprint time.
Single-motor models use a 92 kWh battery and dual-motor versions get a 106-kWh pack. The single-motor versions get a 92-kilowatt-hour battery, while the dual-motor versions get a 106-kWh battery.
Volvo says that, thanks to its high-power electrical system, the ES90 can use DC fast chargers rated at 350 kW or more (although it is limited to drawing power at a maximum of 350 kW). At that 350 kW peak output, an ES 90 battery, of eiher size can be recharged from 90% depleted back to 80% of capacity in 20 minutes, helping to minimize time spent in EV charging parks while road-tripping.
Volvo didn’t mention home charging capabilities during the reveal, but we expect the ES 90 will have the same xx kw Level 2, 240-volt capability as the EX90. That’s good for an overnight recharge of a fully depleted battery.
The ES90 also carries the hardware to enable bi-directional charging, so that with the proper set-up you can use electrons stored in its battery to power household appliances during a blackout and/or send power back to the grid when there’s a need.
We’ve not yet been in one so can’t comment on the ES90’s on-road performance, but it boasts air suspension and an active chassis and if it is anything like the EX90s or the Polestar 3, it will be everything you’d expect of a sporty luxury EV.
Range?
The U.S. version of the Volvo ES90 hasn’t been released yet, so there are no range and fuel efficieny numbers. Under the more lenient, less high-speed testing down in Europe, the ES80 gets a range estmate of uo to 700 kilometers, or 435 miles, but we’d expect that to drop into the mid 300s under federal EPA testing. The heavier and less streamlined EX90 gets a 310-miles rating in the U.S.
Inside the ES90
Content-wise, the ES90 shares most of its standard features with the SUV, although a few changes have been made – different control knobs for the audio systems, for instance – to keep things looking fresh in the Scandinavian minimalist interior.
A 14.5-inch vertically oriented digital color touchscreen in the center of the dash is control central for most of what can be controlled in the ES90, including various drive modes and safety, driver assist and comfort features. A narrow horizontally oriented 9-inch digital screen on the dash behind the steering wheel provides info drivers need to know – and there’s a color head up display to augment that.
Front seats are heated and ventilated, as are the the individually reclining rear seats , and while early info is only that the interior is outfitted with “progressive materials designed to stay true” to Volvo’s “sustainability ambiyions, the auomaker hasnt shied away from using real leather as many other EV makers have, so we expect the same nappa leather trimmed seating as in thre EX90.
There’s also a 25-speaker Bower & Wilkins audio system, wireless phone charger, wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto connectivity, a surround-view camera system, and a Snapdragon Cockpit-powered infotainment system with Google services including Google Maps, and Google Assistant.
The interior is almost as airy as a convertible with the top down – thanks to a self-dimming electrochromic panoramic glass roof that stretches the width and length of the seating areas. That glass is UV blocking, and if our experience with similar roofs in the Polestar 2 and 3 is any indicator, that means virtually no heat is passed down into the cabin on sunny days – a relief because there’s no interior shade to cover the glass.
A long – 122.1 inches – wheelbase and flat floor make for a lot of interior room and the ES90 stacks up well in passenger and cargo space against likely EV competitors such as the Mercedes- Benz EQE, BMW i5 and Tesla Model S sedans.
We could drown you in numbers, but suffice it today that the Volvo leads the quartet in front headroom by as much as 1.5 inches, is in third place in rear headroom but trails the leader by a mere three-tenths of an inch, leads in front legroom by as much as 1.2 inches, and trails the pack in rear legroom by as much as 2.6 inches but is just a tenth of an inch behind the Tesla Model S.
Cargo
Tesla’s Model S is the category’s leader in cargo space, bt the ES90 is firmly in second place- thanks to its open cargo area with hatchback access. With the rear seats up, the Volvo claims 15.8 cubic feet of cargo capacity versus 11 cubes for the Mercedes EQE and 17.3 cubic feet for the BMW iX. With the rear seats folded, the ES90’s cargo capacity jumps to 44 cubic feet. The BMW and Mercedes are true sedans with separate trunks so can’t offer an uninterrupted cargo area that rins from the back to the front seats to the rear bumper. The Model S, though, boasts 25 cubic feet with rear seats up and 62 cubes with those seats folded away.
The Model S also has a front trunk – or frunk – that measures a decent 3.1 cubic feet – enough for a small carry-on bag – while the ES90’s frunk is a scant 0.8 cubes. Neither of the German EVs offers a frunk.
