A Tiny Little Wish List for the XC90
Twenty-one years ago, my wife and I built our house. Okay, we had it built for us, by a contractor who at the time was only building one or two homes a year. Ours took nine months, which for me was just right. It meant things moved slowly enough to be thoughtful about changes along the way—to make sure that everything was just the way we wanted it to be. For several years after we moved in, I would often remark to friends that if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have changed anything about our house. I was pretty satisfied with myself.
Inevitably, of course, I began to discover a few things that I might have done differently. Finish the entire basement, rather than just part of it. Make the upstairs bathroom substantially bigger—there was all kinds of extra attic space we could have commandeered. Use cherry for the kitchen cabinets, rather than stained birch.
After 15 months with my 2019 Volvo XC90, I’ve found a few things I’d have the good folks in Gothenburg change too, if it were up to me:
1. Tweak the front seat cushions in the Inscription trim. As I’ve noted before, the side bolsters on the front seat cushions (not the seat backs) in the Inscription trim are much more aggressive than they are on the Momentum-trim seats—a bit too aggressive for my taste. I’d make them slightly less vertical, to better accommodate a wider, uh, bottom.
2. Add wireless smartphone charging and wireless Apple CarPlay. There’s no obvious place to put your smartphone when it’s plugged in to access CarPlay. You could leave it in the center console cubby, but if you then want to grab it for any reason, you have to dig it out. Wireless charging and wireless CarPlay access would solve these first-world problems.
3. Add a few more cup holders. I’m not a fan of eating or drinking in my XC90, but inevitably there are times when you—and maybe the people riding with you—want a drink. Two cup holders in the front center console are okay, but in the second row, which seats up to three people, there are only two cupholders. And they are in the fold-down console that makes the center seating position unusable. If you have three people back there, none will have a cupholder for their drink.
4. Make directions from Apple maps or Waze viewable on the head-up display, just like those for the vehicle’s own navigation system are viewable. (I suspect this won’t be an issue in newer models, which are going to get an Android infotainment system.)
5. Add power-folding third-row seats. It’s not terribly difficult to flip the third-row seats up and down, but it does require some maneuvering, such as accessing the seats from the second-row doors, or stretching from the rear of the vehicle. And it just seems odd that this feature, available on many lesser-priced vehicles, isn’t offered by Volvo.
Well, that’s about it. Not bad at all when you consider how complex a modern vehicle is., and all the ways things could have gone wrong.
Miles driven: 13,923
XC90 Detecting a Cyclist