Electric Adapter

Volvo's latest EV breathes new life into the sedan genre by blurring the lines between the traditional four-door and the SUVs eating into its market share

- By: Gareth Dean

It was writer, social commentator and futurist H.G. Wells (of War of the Worlds and The Island of Dr. Moreau fame) who, in his final book, Mind at the End of Its Tether, coined the phrase “adapt or perish”. This may sound a little hifalutin when writing about the latest addition to Volvo's EV portfolio but given its less-than-conventional makeup it is, in fact, rather pertinent. In as much as Wells was almost Nostradamus-like in his late-1800s writing to foresee such things as the World Wide Web, satellite communications, space travel, and nuclear weapons, in writing Tether he looked at humanity's future in the face of rapid societal and environmental changes, and determined that the only things capable of surviving were those able to adapt to change. It's been much the same story in the automotive sphere. Manufacturers who've doggedly hung their hopes on the fortunes of such dying genres as D-segment hatchbacks and large sedans have seen their fortunes wane in the face of a buying public that favours SUVs and crossovers. It's perhaps with this shift in tastes that Volvo has decided to give the largely sedan-inspired ES90 some interesting adaptive traits that could well see it neatly sidestep the pitfalls of its less versatile contemporaries.