Remember when Volvos were square? Having never been in fashion, they could never fall out of it. They had, instead, a kind of solid permanence. Now look at the bulbous new XC60, due in South Africa early in 2009.
It's the work of Steve Mattin, a British designer responsible for the original Mercedes-Benz A-Class, the previous-model S-Class and the first version of the current SL. He's proud of it.
I ask him: "After designing an object of beauty (I lied a little here; I think the XC60 is a bit overdone), doesn't it break your heart to see one crashed?"
He replies: "It's not a problem, they won't crash."
It's a neat answer, one that ties in with Volvo's latest technology: City Safety.
You now don't have to pay much attention when crawling through traffic because the XC60 will stop automatically when you come up behind another car - or anything else with a reflective surface.
You need to be travelling at less than 15km/h to be sure of avoiding an impact and the stopping is necessarily quite violent but it really works. Low-speed shunts could be a thing of the past.
City Safety will be standard on every XC60. It uses a laser beam fired from below the interior mirror and calculates what it might need to do 50 times a second.
Maybe you like the idea of a car controlling you. Or maybe you think it encourages inattention. Whatever, City Safety might allow lower insurance premiums and that would be a good thing.
For all its bold new look and talk of fusing coupé style with 4x4 ruggedness, the XC60 is a hard car to place in the Volvo range.
You would think Volvo would have created a slightly smaller SUV and gained a more useful range spread. But you'd reckon without the vital US market whose needs - pre-credit crunch, at least - dictate a size of SUV below which an automaker is not taken seriously.
The XC60 isn't especially roomy but it's a good load-bearer with the back seats folded and the decor is striking. The seats have contrasting colour sections and the usual "floating"' centre console is even more ethereally attached. It's angled towards the driver and has a larger space behind it, useful for storage.
There are three engines to begin with, each mounted across the nose: two five-cylinder, 2.4-litre turbodiesels of 122 or, for the D5 version, 138kW, and a three-litre, 210kW, turbo straight-six petrol.
This comes only with a six-speed auto transmission. It's hard to imagine it finding many buyers, especially as prices start at the equivalent of R510 000 (in the UK).
GRUMBLY DIESEL
It propels the XC60 from 0-100km/h in 7.1sec and sounds smooth but is ferociously thirsty. Better, then, to concentrate on a diesel version, of which only the more powerful D5 was available to drive at the launch.
It's a grumbly engine by modern standards but once you're moving the pleasing harmonic of a straight-five comes through. The D5 is reluctant to get going, though, especially in automatic guise, not least because this is nearly two tons of SUV.
There will, however, be a lighter, front-wheel-drive-only XC60 with a revised turbodiesel engine in 2009. That's all right, then.
The XC60 stays impressively level through corners and curves for a tall and heavy vehicle. The price, however, is a firm ride over bumps that gets quite unpleasant in the back seats.
The rising waistline also makes it impossible to see what's coming when you stop an angled intersection with a main road that slopes downhill. I'm underwhelmed by the Volvo XC60: it should be smaller and lighter.
But then I'm not an American buyer.
*The XC60 will be on display at the Volvo Ocean Race in Cape Town's Waterfront from the beginning of November until the race restart on November 15. - The Independent, London