• Solid construction
• Comfortable seats
• Busy infotainment system

How is the quality and layout?

Build quality is excellent. You need to search very hard to find cheap plastics in the V60’s cabin – everything you interact with feels expensive. The windows switches are heavy and precise, the stalks are sturdy and the air vents feel like they’re held in place with rose joints.

The digital gauge cluster is quite attractive, too. It’s a simple unit displaying only the most necessary info such as your speed and remaining range. There also isn’t much scope for customisation, which is either brilliant or disappointing depending how much of a technophile you are.

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The cabin layout is attractive, if not the most functional. If you have a minimalist Swedish home, we’re sure you’ll adore the V60. If not, you might find it a bit irritating because Volvo has stripped away almost all the car’s switchgear and pushed as many functions as possible onto the infotainment screen. This throws up some practicality and safety issues, as we’ll explain below.

Infotainment and technology

The V60 Cross Country’s infotainment screen is quite small by modern standards. It’s a 9.0-inch portrait unit, which looks like a 1980s portable TV alongside the home cinema-sized 15.5-inch unit fitted to the equally touchscreen-led cabin of the Ford Mustang Mach-E. That means the icons are small – and that means they’re hard to hit on bumpy roads.

Thankfully, Volvo had the common sense to design a fixed climate menu at the bottom of the screen but, like everything else on the unit, the buttons are minute. If you want to switch off your heated seat, for example, you’ll need to take your eyes off the road, focus on the bottom right of the screen and paw relentlessly at the panel in the hope the road smooths out enough for your finger to contact the correct half-inch square on the screen.

But that’s not the worst part. Say you’re driving along a country road and want to disengage lane assist because the white lines aren’t well-maintained enough for the system to function properly. You’ll need to dig through three sub menus before you can switch it off – and once you’re on the correct screen, the toggle switch for the technology is irritatingly small.

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Volvo’s answer to our frustrations is its voice control system. It can be used for functions like adjusting the cabin temperature, changing the radio station and reading your text messages to you. However, it’s powered by Google and, like the technology powering your home smart speaker, it’s rather disobedient. You also can’t use it to switch off any of the car’s safety equipment.

It’s awfully hypocritical for a brand so focused on preventing road fatalities to put a distraction-maker-5000 in the middle of the dashboard. Knobs and buttons would have been much safer because you don’t need to look at them to use them. Screens are less safe because you need to pay them your full attention. It why we’re not allowed to use our phones while driving anymore.

Comfort

• Supportive front seats
• Great driving position
• Avoid large wheels

The V60 Cross Country is a comfortable car if you spec it correctly. The seats and steering wheel offer plenty of adjustment, which means any driver should be able to get comfortable. The seats are also very supportive, with a particularly good lumbar support setting. You’ll probably find them a little firm upon first encounter, but you soon get acclimatised.

The rear seats are surprisingly comfortable, too – and even the most affordable Plus model has heating elements in the outer two rear chairs. You even get four-zone climate control, meaning every passenger can adjust the temperature of air coming out of their vents individually.

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Leave it on the standard 18-inch wheels and it’s a very easy to car to cover long distances in. If you step up to the optional 19 or 20-inch alloys, though, you’ll ruin the ride. That’s because the V60 Cross Country isn’t available with the same adaptive suspension you can have on the standard Volvo V60.