Volvo EX90 (2024 - ) Electric review

This is a very expensive SUV, which will cost you over £100,000 with some options and/or should you go for the Performance version, with its extra 100 horsepower. Worth noting, however, a cheaper, single-motor version is on the way in 2025, which we’d probably recommend. That immediately puts the EX90 out of reach for most large families looking for a seven-seater. On the other hand, people still mistake Volvo for a mass-market brand, whereas the marque has been moving steadily into the luxury sphere for the past few years, so the EX90 should sit alongside the electric Range Rover (when it arrives), Mercedes EQS SUV (which is about £30K more) and perhaps even Bentley Bentayga Hybridin consideration. There’s the much cheaper Kia EV9, but it doesn’t offer the same refinement. Owners will claw back some expenses through running this car on electricity rather than fuel if they have a home charger, where the unit cost of electricity can drop as low as 6p per kWh overnight, meaning 200 miles’ charge for a fiver or so. Also, until next April, there is only two per cent tax on electric cars bought as company cars, and no VED/road tax. Buy now, before the incentives end.

The jury’s out as this car is so new that many software updates have yet to arrive, so we’re giving it the benefit of the doubt, based on Volvo’s reputation, which is average in most league tables. The launch of the EX90 has been delayed by software issues but we’d expect things to run smoothly now - the company boss said of the delay that he was not prepared to roll out a half-finished car. The other good news is that the EX90 has a battery passport allowing the buyer to see the car’s carbon footprint, where it was made, and with what critical raw materials, allowing both buyer and service managers and repair technicians full access to the information that will help them understand its lifespan and health.

The brand that invented the three-point seatbelt and then released the patent to all competitors for the benefit of humanity still leads the way in safety. Right now, the EX90 has all the stuff you’d expect at this price point, including ‘autopilot’ (one hand must stay lightly on the wheel however), parking cameras and sensors, blind-spot alert, automatic braking, lane-departure warning and so on, plus a load of airbags. Very cool kit coming in the future includes radar sensing how many people, including pets, are in the car so if, for example, you leave your dog on the back seat, it won’t lock the car. Looking ahead the EX90 is also set up for true self-driving, without a human at the wheel, and the car will commence trials on Californian roads soon.

The XC90 has always been the most comfortable and most spacious seven-seat SUV you can buy and the EX90 goes even further given there’s no interference from the rumble of an engine. Everything is ultra-smooth and ultra-quiet. The very best bit for large families is the boot space with that third row of seats up - no other car can match it. There is genuinely enough room for 10 bags of the weekly supermarket shop alongside seven occupants, which is just staggering. The EX90 gets better, because Volvo has played around with the design of the space between the driver and front passenger, offering a clever deep storage bin which has a halfway shelf you can use or fold down, depending on how deep you need it to be, plus a large basement tray for wallets, magazines, apples, two cup holders and multiple USB-C sockets… There’s also a magnificent and humungous glass roof which bathes all seven seats in daylight, emphasising the space inside. Plus, an air purifier and third-row air conditioning.

We do wish car companies would stop launching half-finished cars dependent on future software updates to fulfil their promise. The pressure for manufacturers to get new vehicles on the road is understandable but it means the EX90, like many other new cars, will need re-evaluating after the next round of software updates due in 2025. Included in the over-the-air updates coming is CarPlay – frustrating that it’s not there from the start – and additional safety features. Most is already forgiven because you do get Google powering the sat-nav from launch on the massive glossy screen, which is a game-changing addition given the high quality of the maps and the ability to search for hotels, place names and anything else via voice command. You can lock and unlock the car with your phone, too, which is handy, and there’s a decent head-up display alongside the small screen behind the steering wheel and the large central touch-screen. The best feature is the incredible 25-speaker, three-dimensional Bowers & Wilkins stereo on the top trim - save your pennies for this option. We’ve never heard anything like it.

There are two versions of the twin-motor EX90, one the standard offering 408 horsepower, the other a Performance version offering 517 horsepower. You get a maximum 374 miles from both, which is going to be more like 320 miles in real-world driving. Good as that is for a massively heavy car we worry that, once you have loaded with people and are driving it on a UK winter day, you’ll get something more like 250-280 miles out of it. Not a problem if you’re using it for the school run only Monday to Friday, as most families probably will. But limiting when you venture on longer motorway journeys. At launch there is only the twin-motor option while a single-motor version follows which may well prove better in every respect. More broadly we love the way this car steers, accelerates, glides, brakes and corners on its air suspension. It is very grown-up, very serene and very elegant. Which speaks volumes about the skill of the engineers - we challenge another 2.7-tonne SUV on the market to appear so soothing.