Swift Security

Sport-utility vehicle buyers were startled when Volvo entered that segment a couple of years ago. They will be startled all over again when they get a chance to try the 2006 Volvo XC90 with a specially built V8.

Volvo has never varied from its heritage of building the safest vehicles in the industry, but the Swedish carmaker’s biggest asset is also its biggest weakness: Power-craving American buyers misunderstood Volvo’s safety as stodginess, and believed its vehicles were aimed at intellectual elitists.

The redesign of the S40, S60, and S80 sedans and their companion station wagons has helped modernize Volvo’s image. More recently, models such as the limited-production 300-horsepower S60R sports sedan and the just-introduced C70 convertible with its disappearing hardtop moved away from that conservative image and into the passing lane. The XC90 already had broken new ground for Volvo—winning the 2003 North American Truck of the Year award, which was quite an achievement for Volvo’s first truck. With its new V8, the passing lane is likely to be pretty crowded with Volvos.

The XC90 redefines the term cross-over SUV for 2006. A crossover SUV is basically a sport-utility truck that “crosses over” to a car-based platform, resulting in a smoother, carlike ride. The new V8 will cross over to entice mainstream luxury-SUV buyers, as well as Macalester professors, to the XC90.

As good as the first XC90 was, Volvo knew that 30 percent of premium-SUV buyers in the United States choose V8 engines, so its engineers planned to put a V8 in future XC90s. The problem was finding a V8 that fit—literally as well as figuratively.

When Volvo develops its vehicles, including the XC90, crash-testing is done before an engine is installed. Then Volvo plugs an engine, either an inline five- or six-cylinder, into the undamaged pocket behind the metal crumpled in the crash-test. By installing the engine transversely in the undamaged area, a frontal impact is unlikely to push it into the occupant compartment, another safety feature. Volvo insisted that any prospective V8 fit into the same narrow slot.

There was only one problem. No such V8 engine existed, even when Volvo scoured the extensive supply of power plants from Ford, its corporate owner. Ford put Volvo in touch with Japanese engine-builder Yamaha—and the trail that led to the new V8 is almost artistic to follow.

Yamaha builds outstanding motorcycles, snowmobiles, outboard motors, and all-terrain vehicles, and also has built special high-performance automotive engines for such cars as the Ford Taurus SHO V6 and more recently the Toyota Celica and Matrix and the Pontiac Vibe. Yamaha agreed to take on the project, which meant accommodating the exacting requirements to fit the carefully designed XC90 engine slot, as well as other stringent demands.

Yamaha came through, creating a uniquely compact 4.4-liter V8. The cylinder banks are at a sixty-degree, rather than ninety-degree, angle from each other, and are offset by half a cylinder—creating a layout with the cylinders more serpentine than directly opposite each other and with all the auxiliary parts and accessory drives tucked below the cylinder banks or integrated within the width of the engine. The finished engine is 29.7 inches long and only 25 inches wide.

All the latest high-tech features are incorporated. Dual overhead camshafts are activated by chains, not belts, with continuously variable valve-timing to improve fuel efficiency and power. When the air-fuel mixture goes into the intake chamber, it is actually separated to make the V8 operate more like two four-cylinder engines at lower engine speed, optimally using the 325 foot-pounds of torque over a larger curve. At higher RPMs, the intake mixture is rejoined, dispensing the full 311 horsepower. All that power expands the XC90’s towing capability to 5,000 pounds.