The Volvo Concept XC Coupe is expected to return in production form as a 2-door version of the XC90.
Everything you may have known about Volvo is wrong – certainly if you’re stuck back in the old days when the Swedish maker produced a narrow line of boxy, boring stations wagons. These days, the maker is rolling out some increasingly dynamic and curvaceous designs with only a single wagon in its line-up and, oh, yes, Volvo is now owned by the ambitious Chinese automaker Geely.
We’ll get a good sense of where Volvo is heading in the days ahead when it tolls out its new Concept XC Coupe at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.
It’s the successor to the Volvo Concept C that we first saw at the Frankfurt Motor Show last autumn, which Volvo insiders confirmed as giving the world a good sense of the company’s future design direction.
Indeed, the Volvo Concept XC Coupe is expected to return in production form later this year as a coupe version of the next-generation XC90 crossover.
The Concept XC Coupe adopts the increasingly familiar new Volvo tail design.
Volvo gave us a hint of what’s in store last month with a teaser image of the new concept. But now we have some official images of the full show car. Make that semi-official, as they’ve been leaked out and brought to our attention thanks to British magazine Carbuyer.co.uk and our friends at Autoblog.com.
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While the Concept XC Coupe shows just how dramatically Volvo’s design direction has shifted, one thing hasn’t changed: the Swedish maker’s long fixation on safety. A closer look reveals that the new show car relies on a new surround radar system as well as camera technology that can give the car’s automated safety system a 360-degree view of the road.
“Volvo Concept XC Coupe is perfectly in tune with (an) active lifestyle,” Thomas Ingenlath, Senior Vice President Design of Volvo Car Group, said in a release accompanying last month’s teaser image. “Its capability and protection is cleverly integrated into the sophisticated looks. The XC is ready and willing to bring you into the adventure zone and back.”
Like two other new Volvo show cars, the Concept XC Coupe is based off of Volvo’s new Scalable Product Architecture, a flexible platform that will be used for the maker’s midrange and larger models, such as the next-gen XC90.
(Click Here to see how Volvo did in the latest Consumer Reports auto reliability survey.)
An overhead look at the concept's interior layout.
Suggesting the show car was influenced by “modern high-tech sports equipment,” the two-door, four-seater features a longer dash-to-axle design – the distance from the front axle to the dashboard which tends to give the car a more muscular, well-planted appearance. The design adopts both a new hood and a bow-like beltline running virtually the length of the entire show car.
The front of the Concept XC Coupe is distinguished by a new “floating” grille design, which is flanked by distinctive T-shaped Daytime Running Lamp “light pipes.”
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To further enhance its sporty appearance, the Concept XC rides on 21-inch wheels and tires, though the production model may only offer those as optional equipment. The wheel arches are more pronounced on the new show car, while the roofline is a bit taller than with the current XC90.
We’ll apparently have to wait for Volvo’s Detroit Auto Show news conference to find out what’s under that new hood. The Chinese-owned maker is in the midst of making a dramatic – and potentially risky – shift in its powertrain strategy and, within a few years, promises to focus solely on electric propulsion or four-cylinder engines, whether gas-powered, turbocharged or hybridized.