Volvo's resurrection plan: Big power from small engines

You heard it here first: Volvo is the best Chinese car you can buy in America. OK, fine, the best Swedish car funded by the Chinese. But without Chinese carmaker Geely stepping up back in 2010, Volvo could very well have gone the way of Saab — which is to say, fondly rememberedbut no longer with us. Perhaps worse, it could’ve been swallowed by car-clueless investors who lack the means to develop new product, leading to years of Zombie Volvos.  Geely, though, has the money and willpower to accomplish what Ford never did—a wholesale overhaul of Volvo’s entire strategy.

Two words: four cylinders. Going forward, every Volvo will have a four-banger under the hood. The idea is to deliver small-bore economy along with big-motor performance. That promise has been hitched to plenty of other powertrains, from hybrids to turbocharged V-6s, and usually only half of the equation proves true. The Volvo S60 T6 Drive-E, though, churns out a 28 mpg EPA combined rating along with its 302 hp. That’s an unusual combination, especially for a non-hybrid.

Volvo isn’t the first company to squeeze more than 300 hp out of a 2.0-liter four-cylinder, but I’d say it’s created the most seamless 300 hp ever to emerge from a motor this size. With both a supercharger and a turbocharger, the Volvo four doesn’t favor one part of its powerband at the expense of another. Low-rpm thrust is instantaneous, courtesy of the belt-driven supercharger. Once the big turbo spools up, the supercharger de-clutches and the engine-management electronics pass the baton to the turbocharger.

The transition is undetectable — at low RPM you hear some signature supercharger whine. And then later on, you don’t. Some single-turbo motors are more ragged than this, merely by dint of choppily deployed wastegates. This thing’s slick. And its 295 lb-ft of torque matches the V-8 of the outgoing BMW M3. The S60 runs 0-60 in 5.6 seconds with nary a twitch of torque steer.