• Plenty of room front and rear
• Boot space is practical, but high up
• Hybrid batteries take up minimal space

How much space is there?

The XC60 offers generous seating space for four. There are five seatbelts, but anyone relegated to the middle rear seat will be battling with those on either side for elbow and shoulder room.

The middle rear seat also gets the short straw for legroom due to the central transmission tunnel robbing them of space for their feet. Headroom shouldn’t be an issue unless you’re transporting a team of basketball players, and that’s even with the optional panoramic glass roof.

Boot space and storage

While the boot lip is rather high – as is typical for an SUV – the XC60 has a large, practical boot space that’s accessed via a powered tailgate, standard on every model in the UK. The rear seats feature headrests that automatically fold out of the way when you lower them.

Where adaptive suspension is fitted, you’ll find another pair of buttons alongside this that make the XC60 squat down so you don’t have to lift your luggage as high to get it in. When the rear seats are folded they leave a flat (if high) boot floor that rises slightly towards the front of the cabin. A special boot mat is available that unfolds to protect both the rear seat backs and the bumper.

Because the XC60 was designed to be a hybrid from the start, the Recharge models cause no reduction in boot space since the batteries for the electric motor are housed in the central tunnel. You will find the cupholders above it are slightly shallower, however.

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Is it easy to park?

As a mid-size SUV, the XC60 is taller than cars such as the Volvo V60 estate, with which it shares its fundamental structure, but doesn’t take up that much more room on the road. With the high seating position it’s relatively easy to manoeuvre in tight spaces. If you want to make life easier in this regard, the 360-degree camera system gives you a top-down perspective on your surroundings, allowing you to see kerbs and other obstacles very clearly.

There’s no excuse for not parking straight where this is fitted. Want more help still? Then go for Park Assist, an automatic parking system that can position the XC60 in both parallel and 90-degree spaces with very little driver input.

Safety

• Built to be one of the safest cars ever
• Vast array of active safety technology
• 2021 facelift gets even more standard kit

Volvo has built its reputation on safety, and the XC60 fully embraces this philosophy – the firm unabashedly described it as ‘one of the safest cars ever made’ when it was initially launched. So no surprise that it achieved one of the highest scores of any car when crash-tested by Euro NCAP at the end of 2017.

Testing has got tougher since then, but with seven airbags and all the active safety systems Volvo includes, we’d still expect the XC60 to perform very well to even the latest standards.

The roster of safety equipment now fitted to every XC60 includes not only Volvo City Safety – a combination of autonomous emergency braking system that works in forwards and reverse with Steer Assist to help you take evasive action – but also Oncoming Lane Mitigation (steers you away from oncoming traffic if you accidentally wander into its path) and Run-off Road Mitigation (same but stops you veering off the road altogether).

The also included Run-off Road Protection aims to reduced the severity of accidents where the car does leave the road entirely – partly by tightening the front seat belts to restrain your movements, partly though a collapsible seat structure intended absorb spine-threatening impacts. And, like all Volvos built from summer 2020, the XC60 has an electronically limited top speed of 112mph, regardless of its power output.

Higher specification models also benefit from two further standard-fit safety packages: Driver Assistance and Driver Awareness. The former includes Pilot Assis (very mild ‘semi-autonomous’ self-steering capability in limited circumstances plus adaptive cruise control), the latter bundles blindspot monitors that can make steering inputs, cross traffic alert with auto brake, and a rear collision warning and mitigation system.

These are optional on entry-level versions, but you’re probably better off putting the money they cost towards upgrading to the next trim level.

Watch: Volvo XC60 Euro NCAP crash test video