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Volvo to shake off Ford ties with new platforms, engines

It would seem Volvo is finally getting around to throwing all of Ford's things out of the apartment. Automotive News reports the Swedish automaker is preparing to unleash a range of new engines as well as a fresh platform designed entirely in house. The powerplants include an all-new four-cylinder engine set to bow before the end of this year before arriving in the US by 2014. Shortly thereafter, the world should get its first glimpse at the next-generation XC60, which will the company's first model to make use of the Volvo scalable platform architecture (SPA). US buyers can expect to see that machine on their roads by early 2015.
The next V70 and S80 will also use the SPA, though those models will carry V90 and S90 designations when they hit dealer floors. But that doesn't mean Volvo has completely weened itself off of Ford technology. The V40 will continue to ride on Ford bones until the model's next chassis can be co-developed between Volvo and Geely.

Electrify Expo is an all-electrified auto show like the old days

In late July, Autoblog swung by Washington, D.C. to check out the Electrify Expo. Now in its third year of nationwide shows, the Electrify Expo calls itself “North America's largest electric vehicle festival filled with over 1 million square feet of the world's top electric brands.” At every stop, visitors can find out about, crawl around in, drive and ride just about any personal conveyance that uses a battery for propulsion. Truth be told, when the show's PR team reached out to us with an invite, we only considered going after finding out about an area showcasing battery-electric tuner cars. EV tuning is undoubtedly going to be huge—eventually—which got us curious about these early days. We figured weÂ’d brave whatever the rest of the expo was to find out whatÂ’s the equivalent of nitrous for a Tesla. See, the EV event scene is still such that one never knows if theyÂ’ll show up to a mix of science and county fairs with a few cars on display just for truth in advertising, or if theyÂ’ll show up to a parking lot with 26 cars, 10 of them locked, 10 of them homemade, and 6 guarded by promotional hires desperate to tap all your identifying info a tablet before dispensing dubious and superficial information. Which is to say, we didnÂ’t expect much. And that makes us chuffed to report: Electrify Expo is great. We hadnÂ’t been strolling the lot outside the old RFK Stadium for five minutes before thinking, “This feels like an old-school auto show!” The exclamation to that point came from a group of four who cut me off to reach the C40 Recharge in the Volvo booth, one of them exclaiming as if he were the group expert and as if his friends were deaf, “THATÂ’S THE LEAST EXPENSIVE ONE! AND ITÂ’S BEEEE-YOUUUUU-TI-FULLLLLL!” I wasnÂ’t there to judge, I was there for the enthusiasm. Automakers had built small, simple, open booths, parked cars in them, then provided visitors the kind of interactions that will do the most good for anyone wondering about or interested in an EV. We only saw two cars that were off limits, the new Volkswagen ID.Buzz and the Ford F-100 Eluminator. Volvo wouldnÂ’t let me get an espresso from their chic little trailer, either, unless I visited the EX90 Experience trailer first. Otherwise, it was a free-for-all. Tesla had a large booth full of cars. BMW had two i7s open for everyone to sit in, next to the Ford booth with that Eluminator and an unlocked Mustang Mach-E GT and F-150 Lightning showing their cooler-chest-frunk trick.

Volvo EX30 endures a side impact crash test with an EX90

Before Volvo launched the EX90, the Swedish automaker — already known as a pioneer in safety — repeatedly stressed how much work it had done to raise the bar for safety in its new electric SUV. Almost every new release included lines like, "The standard safety in the Volvo EX90 is also higher than any Volvo car before it," and "The Volvo EX90 has an invisible shield of safety enabled by our latest sensing technology, inside and outside." But these focused on the car's electronic suite of sensors and cameras watching everything from the road ahead and behind to the driver's state of fatigue. The company did the same during the launch of the EX30, writing that its new compact electric vehicle protects all occupants "through state-of-the-art restraint technology, as well as top-notch structural design that fulfills our ambitious in-house safety requirements — designed to prepare our cars for various real-world scenarios." To prove a point about the safety of the EX30, Volvo's in-house crash-test lab performed a side impact test, running its largest car, the EX90, into the side of its smallest, the EX30.  We don't get to see any interior view of the EX30 during the test or afterward. In an Automotive News Europe video about the crash and the results, Lotta Jakobsson from the Volvo Cars Safety Center says the data showed that the two "small-sized females" sitting on the struck side "were well protected" in the crash, with minimal infliction of injury. The physical design of both cars helps make this happen. The EX30 was designed to disperse all of its forces around the structure of the car for "balanced interaction" during an event. That's pretty standard stuff. On the EX90, a piece of the lower front structure juts ahead of the vehicle's primary safety structure. As ANE Managing Editor Doug Bolduc puts it, that lower structure is "specifically designed to help it absorb a lot of the power of a crash with a smaller vehicle ... that is to not only provide protection to the passengers of the EX90 but also to provide protection to the passengers of the EX30." The result is "less damage than you might have expected from the larger car onto the smaller car."  Check out the vid and for Jakobsson's take on how current trends in structural, passive, and active safety won't rid the world of crashes, but they are reducing injuries while at the same time making crashes less common.