Volvo XC60 T8

FIRST UK DRIVE Plug-in hybrid SUV has lots of power, but does it excite? We try it on British roads

- James Batchelor

IT won’t have escaped your notice that from 2019 every new Volvo will come with an electric motor to power it in some way or another – cars such as the XC60 T8, for example.

It’s a plug-in hybrid, or as Volvo grandly calls it, a ‘Twin Engine’ SUV. Of course, this isn’t the first plug-in hybrid that Volvo has made; there have been the slightly underwhelming V60 D5 and D6 estates, and more recently the XC90 T8.

In fact, you could say the XC60 T8 is just a smaller version of the XC90 T8. Thanks to the Scalable Platform Architecture that first appeared on the XC90, this Volvo’s underpinnings and powertrain set-up are near enough identical to its big brother’s.

So there’s a 2.0-litre four-cylinder petrol engine that’s both super and turbocharged serving up 314bhp that drives the front wheels, and there’s an 86bhp electric motor at the back driving the rears, all hooked up to an eight-speed automatic gearbox.

In the XC60, though, the motor gets its power from a 10.4kWh battery rather than the XC90’s 9.2kWh unit, and this car can travel up to 28 miles on pure electric alone.