Volvo V40 D4 2013 Review

Volvo’s V40 five-door hatch is the Swede’s most important car in years.

It is a rationalisation model that supplants not one but three variants on the compact platform it shares with Ford -- the S40 sedan, V50 wagon and C30 hatch.

The D4 tested here is the up-spec Luxury diesel, a 2.0-litre five-cylinder good for a class-leading 130kW and 400Nm. Starting at $45,990 plus on-road costs, the Luxury trim serves up what you’d expect in this premium-hatch segment, with some very Volvo extras of the kind you hope to never use.

It starts with the base V40 Kinetic spec’s alloy wheels, climate control, auto lights and wipers, rear parking beepers, cruise, multifunction steering wheel, electric driver’s seat and photochromatic rear-view mirror.

Luxury trim upgrades the alloys to 17-inch and the seats to leather, adding an electric passenger seat and a sat-nav package with a reversing camera on a seven-inch centre screen.

It also gets bi-Xenon headlights, and they’re maybe the best this driver has sampled anywhere. Oncoming drivers can count themselves lucky it comes with an auto-dim sensor.

The Luxury interior is an inviting mix of hide, brushed aluminium and high-quality plastics. The upper dash is Goldilocks stuff: soft enough to impart tactile appeal, hard enough to last.

Safety kit is first class, with the V40 scoring Euro NCAP’s highest safety rating. Along with benchmark interpretations of all the usual chassis and brake electronics, it has seven interior airbags (with driver’s kneebag), plus an external one up front for the benefit of pedestrians not saved from impact by the City Safety autonomous emergency braking package.

Our test car came with the optional Driver Support Pack, a well-spent $5K adding adaptive cruise with collision warning and full auto braking (City Safety only works up to 50km/h), blind spot, cross-traffic and lane departure warning systems.

For good measure, it throws in full park assist, heated front seats and tinted rear glass.

It also features a system that reads and reproduces road signs on the splendid three-mode TFT (thin fluorescent transistor) instrument panel, the latter a
segment benchmark for its clarity of purpose, breadth of function and ease of use.

Allowing you to scroll between Elegance, ECO and Performance motifs, this is no gimmick. TFT is without doubt the way of the future, both for potential production cost benefits and for functional flexibility.

Here, for example, the green-lit ECO mode serves up an ECO guide gauge and fuel consumption data in ways that help on fuel economy, while red-hued Performance turns the large virtual centre gauge in the centre to a tacho, with a big numerical speedo within it. It works beautifully.

Indeed, the V40 works beautifully as a package. The cockpit shows a keen eye for driver ergonomics. The front seats cosset without squeezing, with headroom enough all round. It’s easy to find an ideal driving position, and to navigate your way around the controls -- all it takes to scroll your way through the instrument themes is a roller switch and a confirm button on the indicator stalk. Easy.

The rear’s good for two adults, tight for three. Leg- and foot-room are decent for a hatch in this segment. That upswept shoulder line and broad C-pillar take their toll in rear visibility, though -- the V40 really does need that rear camera.

Cargo space is an adequate 335 litres with all the seats up, opening to an unconfirmed but large volume with the 60:40 split-fold seats down -- well, as far as they can go down, anyway, because they don’t fold flat. Handily, though, the front passenger seat folds forward, allowing you to carry long things with room for a passenger aft of the driver. Storage is good, with drink-sized door pockets and a handy tray behind the floating centre stack.

In motion, the V40 imparts the tightly integrated, nuggetty feel of a car that’s nicely screwed, glued and stitched onto a well-engineered chassis.
The 2.0-litre five-cylinder oiler is a lively specimen, good for 130kW and 400Nm from 1750-2750rpm. It pushes the 1500kg V40 from 0-100km/h in 8.3 seconds with the six-speed auto (8.6 for the manual), but it feels quicker -- maybe a function of a little lag and the minor discomfort the front wheels reveal managing the surge of torque when the boost cuts in. And exiting the torque band at the other end, the mojo tapers off pretty quickly.

There’s a purpose to this peakiness. It’s designed to keep you light on the right foot. It’s also not that successful. Against Volvo’s official 6.8L/100km urban fuel consumption figure, our urban-only week yielded consistent eights, from low to high. On the upside, this engine is approaching runout, with the new Drive-E power plants due in the first half of 2014.

The ride/handling equation is decent, with a little skew to the latter. Throwing it into a corner, plenty of grip allows for a high stability-system threshold. The steering seems a bit comfort-for-all in its weighting, but it’s responsive and linear, low on understeer if a bit numb in the way so many electrically-assisted systems are.

On the 17-inch wheels, the V40 absorbs the minor rough without a fuss. If it gets a bit unsure of itself under cornering duress on imperfect tar, its trouble thresholds are high.

Even in the $50K guise we see here, the V40 D4 Luxury brings a decent value proposition to its segment. As our test car presents, it’s pricier than its German competitors, but it’s also bigger and more potent, with a class-leading safety package and a feel that’s right for the money. The money also buys you three years of free scheduled servicing.