Where solidity meets style. . .

By Gary S. Vasilash

Last year a colleague was involved in a serious automobile accident. After his recovery, he needed a new vehicle.

He told me, “My wife said no more fooling around. You are going to buy a Volvo.”

She remembered the company once emphasized the safety engineering that was part and parcel of Volvo vehicles.

The company pioneered such things as the three-point safety belt and the rear-facing child seat. It devised the side-impact protection system (if you are driving and in a front end collision you’ve got the whole engine in front of you and if you are hit in the rear, there is a lot of real estate between you and the rear of your vehicle, but if you happen to look to your immediate left, there isn’t a whole lot of there there). Then there were things like seat-mounted airbags and a curtain-style airbag. And there were sensor-based safety development like “City Safety,” which was autonomous emergency braking followed by pedestrian detection with full automatic braking.

But what is key in Volvos is that the company builds them using ultrahigh-strength and hot-formed boron steels, and those elements that make up the structure that you don’t see (it is under the sheet metal that you do see) are geometrically arranged so that not only is the structure sound, but any outside forces acting on it (e.g., something running into it) are channeled so there is essentially a safety cage for the occupants of the vehicle.

Safety.

But people tend to buy vehicles based not on that—at least not top-of-mind, unless they’re like the wife of my colleague, who knows what’s important—but on style and stuff.

And the 2026 Volvo XC90 B6 AWD brings both.

It is a large—seats up to seven—SUV. It has a handsome exterior. Although Volvos were long known for being “boxy,” that’s long gone from the brand’s design language, but there is still a hint of the upright rectangularity in the XC90, which is something of a subtle nod to its roots.

The inside is simply SCANDANAVIAN writ large.

The colors. The materials. The configuration of the seats.

One of the things that Volvo designers have working for them is a long history of a distinctive Swedish design approach that they are able to bring to the vehicle. This is a sort of aesthetic authenticity that makes the vehicle distinctive.

Let’s face it: there are plenty of large SUVs out there so having a solid basis is helpful in differentiating the XC90.

Yes, it has screens—11.2 inches in the center, 12.3 inches for the driver’s gauges—and yes it has an impressive Harman Kardon sound system. But these are the sorts of things that you can find in many vehicles, and many vehicles provide more in terms of screens and sound.

But it is the orchestration and execution that make a difference. Which is where the XC90 really makes a difference.

The vehicle is powered by a 2.0-liter engine. Which might seem like it would be too little for such a big vehicle. But the engine is both turbocharged and supercharged. It produces 295 hp and 310 lb-ft of torque. It moves the mass as necessary.

This is a “mild hybrid,” meaning that it has a 13-hp integrated starter generator and a 48-volt battery system that helps move the vehicle from stops and can add a bit of oomph during hard driving.

The vehicle driven is at the Ultra trim level, which as a starting MSRP of $73,350.

Which might seem like a lot. But then I think back to my colleague’s wife. She has a good sense of what value means.