Sometimes the job calls for a soft, spacious machine that makes an art of being undemanding. In other words, a wafter.
A certain elegance to the design is always nice to have – a 5.0-litre Jag XJ will look rather better on your driveway than an ID7 – but ultimately the calibre of any wafter boils down to effortless cruising and high levels of isolation.
I needed a wafter not long ago. There were several candidates among the test cars at Autocar HQ in London. Some of them were electric, including a Polestar 3 that I know rides supremely well, but because of the sheer mileage planned, the prospect of charging up every day wasn't an enticing one. I settled on a gleaming Volvo XC90, returning it 13 days later with 3000 miles added to the odo and fingerprints all over the huge touchscreen.
Averaging 230 miles daily for nearly a fortnight is a foolproof method of flushing out the weaknesses of any car. This near-£90k Volvo has some of those, for sure, as well as several strengths, more on which in a moment.
The itinerary? First to Anglesey Circuit, where the XC90 played a supporting role for the Maserati MCXtrema test. Photographer Jack Harrison could deliver a passably sharp tracking shot from the back of a donkey cart if need be, so the prospect of him hanging (suitably restrained with a harness) from the wide boot of an air-sprung premium SUV on a glass-smooth circuit all but guaranteed frames crisper than a porcelain poppadom. And they were.
Then it was down to Italy for a busman's autumn getaway, in that I'd briefly disappear in order to attend the launch of the Volvo ES90 in Monaco. When I arrived in Monaco the uniformed event techies wondered why a filthy UK-registered XC90 had just teleported onto the hotel forecourt, but eventually they let me park up next to Volvo's plush new EV fastback and take some photos.
It shouldn't have been the case that the ageing SUV was clearly the more attractive of the two cars, but that is one of the XC90's undeniable trump cards: it still looks superb.
Other things I liked were the raw performance of the 400bhp-plus T8 plug-in hybrid powertrain when I needed to skin a Panda on a Piedmontese hillside and the sense of light and space in the cockpit, which made the Great St Bernard Pass feel superbly immersive.
