Volvo's last new huge sedan, the S80, didn't exactly wow us. They might have said actually, they did say'that the S80 had all the flavor of Wasa crispbread. That automobile left us worried that the wacky engineering folks who created the 150-mph turbocharged bricks of the 1990s had left the company, or perhaps were hit with a debilitating depression after hearing that the hoped-for ABBA reunion would never materialize.
But they don't let the vehicles of the past cloud our new-car judgments. We are prepared for surprises, nice or bad, and occasionally the Swedes offer up shockers like the fleet-footed XC60, the chuckable C30, and transgender surgical procedure. They weren't immediately surprised by the new S60 because nothing about it stands out. It doesn't have the overtly sports-car feel of its rear-drive peers. With a transverse-engine layout, a serious front-weight bias (61.7 percent of the 3896-pound curb weight rests on the front tires), and a standard all-wheel-drive method that is 95 percent front-drive most of the time, the S60 can't pretend to be a sports automobile.
