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There must be a case of upgrade fever taking hold in Gothenburg. Yesterday, we saw the revised Volvo XC40; today it’s the turn of another pair of Volvo SUVs, the bestselling XC60 and the three-row XC90. While the styling changes are more subtle, the new plug-in hybrid powertrain—which more than doubles its real-world electric range—is most welcome. Volvo had sold more than 2.7 million XC60s worldwide by the end of last year, so it’s an important car for the brand. Visually, there are changes to the “Thor’s Hammer” headlights: these keep their distinctive daylight running light signature but now hide matrix LED projectors within their depths. There’s a new front grille as well, one that has been slimmed down a little, together with tweaks to the bumpers, wings, and some other body panels. On the inside, there’s a new ventilated leather interior option, and like the XC40, the new 11.2-inch infotainment system sports a Gemini personal assistant to enable conversational voice control of the android automotive OS-based infotainment system. Based on some brief testing, the new Gemini voice assistant does at least perform a lot better than the previous version, which, if anything, has degraded in ability over the past few years. The most significant change is invisible, but it’s the much larger-capacity lithium-ion battery that powers the electric motor side of the XC60 T8’s plug-in hybrid powertrain. When Volvo first launched the XC60, the PHEV version we tested in 2018 offered a 10.4 kWh (net) battery pack and 17 miles (27 km) of EV range. This increased to 14.9 kWh (net) for the model’s first refresh (which we drove in 2023), increasing its electric driving range to 35 miles (56 km).
document fetched 2026-09-16 02:55 · canonical https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/09/volvo-bigs-up-the-batteries-for-2028-xc60-and-xc90-plug-in-refresh