MotorTrend Names XC90 Among Most Important Cars of the Decade

MotorTrend editors have named the Volvo XC90 one of the 15 most important cars of the past 10 years.

Calling the 2010s “the decade of the crossover,” MotorTrend said Volvo’s three-row SUV—it’s 2016 SUV of the Year—was “among the most forward-looking of them all.” The magazine lauded the “safe-sexy” design of developer Thomas Ingenlath, and the debut of Volvo’s Scalable Product Architecture in the XC90. The magazine also plugged Volvo’s “daring” decision to adopt the Drive-E 2.0-liter-four-cylinder-only powertrain strategy, which includes the turbocharged T5 power plant, the turbo+supercharged T6, and the turbo+supercharged+plug-in-hybrid T8.

Motortrend contends that the T8’s “jumbo battery has allowed the XC90 to serve as an autonomy development platform both inside Volvo and with third-party developers” and said “this alone should ensure this mid-teens crossover’s place in the history books well into the next decade.”

Other vehicles that made MotorTrend’s “most important 15” list included the Tesla Model S, the 2011 Hyundai Sonata, the Tesla Model 3, the gorgeous Porsche 911, the 2011 Chevy Volt, Volkswagen’s TDI Diesel lineup, the Google Car (none of the autonomous cars were ever sold), the Tesla Roadster, the 2011 Nissan Leaf, the raucous Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat, the 2018 Lincoln Navigator, the Chevy Bolt, the Cadillac CTS-V Wagon with manual transmission, and the yet-to-be-released Ford Mustang Mach-E.

There’s a lot of electric power in that lineup.

2020 XC90