Volvo XC90 review: can a family of five get to the Alps without tensions running high?

This was never going to be a classic road movie. There would be no Route 66, no battered Kerouac novel stuffed in a bag, no time to kill just drifting from one strange encounter to the next.

Neither would it be one of those car reviews with Richard Hammond driving a Lamborghini around the breathtaking, twisting and oddly empty roads of the Dolomites.

Sorry about that.

Instead, we are grounded in what may be a familiar reality. And a question that’s been nagging away at me for a few years now: what’s the best way to get a family to the Alps, in one piece, hopefully not too broke, and, even more hopefully, not too stressed?

Why not fly? We have in previous years – it’s the obvious answer. But as the family has grown, so the luggage and expense has multiplied. The taxi driver will look horrified when they pull up to take us to the airport. Presuming the flight isn’t too painful (for the single person in the seat next to you), the hire car will look smaller than it did online when you’re standing in the carpark near the airport, trolleys towering with far too many bags, all too aware that you are still one long and most probably not fun-filled leg from your destination. We know this now. We have the scars.

“We”, you see, now consist of two parents, three children, two snowboards, four pairs of skis, six pairs of boots, five helmets, three pairs of poles and so on (and on). And the expense of excess baggage is enough to explain why many people take to extreme measures to avoid the fees – the BA website even specifies: “For safety reasons you are not allowed to board the aircraft wearing your ski boots.” (Has anyone ever really tried that? Now that is a YouTube clip I would love to see.)

By comparison, the plan running through our minds is less extreme: drive. All the way. How hard can it be? And how lovely to have the chance to sit and talk together as a family for the 12 hours Google tells me it will take?

Here we hit the first hurdle, hard. For it may not be lovely at all to be in a confined space with three kids wedged across the back seat, elbows digging into each other, feet straying into others’ space, brothers breathing others’ air, toys being dropped in the hardest-to-reach recesses of footwells, and slim to no chance of consensus on which of the same old half-dozen audio books to listen to for the four-thousandth time (please, nothing to do with Narnia, anything else). Granted, the golden age of air travel had its sheen of sophistication and luxury irreversibly tarnished for us at around the moment when children outnumbered adults, but still, this alternative plan was not going to be easy. A 12-hour road trip with three children: this requires special planning.

According to pretty much all the reviews (no, I don’t really trust them either – when did you ever see a TV car show where they demo how to get Lego out of air vents?), the Volvo XC90 should be just about the perfect car for the job. It is the Qantas of the wheeled world: as far as the safety experts at Thatcham can tell, no one has ever died in an XC90, and they’ve sold more than 70,000 in the UK alone.

It’s not hard to see why. Top of the less morbid features is design. If you’re tired of the pretty similar BMW/Audi/Mercedes muted, plush, hi-tech leather interiors, and aren’t really convinced by the flashy but flimsy French alternatives or solid but un-starry options from Japan, this ticks the boxes in the same way as expensive Scandinavian furniture. What are these brushed-steel small oval sculptures in the doors? They’re the handles. Why is the silver on-off switch covered in diamond-shaped simples? Because it just is. And the walnut isn’t the shiny sort that Charlie Hungerford would have loved, it’s matte in finish, like a coffee table you’d see in Skandium. I really should have bought some frameless rectangular specs and a black turtle-neck. I’m not sure I’m dressed for this.

More importantly, it’s about the most practical car on the road – squaring up with the more muscular-looking (but slightly boring if you ask me) Audi Q7 for boot and cabin space. We have planned our seating strategy – and parents, pay attention: this is a game changer. There are seven seats: two that flip up in the boot, three across the middle, two up front (obviously). Don’t think you have to keep the boot seats down to fit in the luggage. With ski bags laying lengthways down the middle of the car, and one of the very back seats up, we form three miniature first-class cabins, each child completely walled off from siblings by a three-foot ski-bag barricade. They really should advertise this as “elbow-proof child seating” – even after 1,654 miles, our journey will prove to be astonishingly argument-free. Around seven hours into our drive to Switzerland, somewhere between Metz and Strasbourg, with two children asleep and one, in the very back, in a state of iPad-induced semi-consciousness, the conversation in the two front seats turned to the inevitable: which massage setting is your favourite?

The XC90 is an unbelievably smooth, quiet, well-behaved motorway cruiser. I really don’t like driving a long way. I get tired very quickly, I lose concentration, and that’s dangerous. But I’m feeling fine. It’s the middle of the night, but we’re so relaxed we decide to just keep driving, breaking the journey not for an overnight in a hotel as planned, but just snoozing for an hour in our incredibly comfortable seats. Massage settings off.

Closer to the Swiss border, we debated driverless cars. Would they really ever happen? Well, they kind of already have. It’s easy not to know this if your car is over three or four years old, but some cars do this job impressively already – and particularly this Volvo. It reads speed-limit signs (avoiding speeding fines is a priority in Switzerland since last year’s four-figure penalty), slows down when you get near cars in front, and steers for you around all but the sharpest corners. It even tells you off, politely, should you take your hands and feet off the controls. You get the impression they could call this driverless if they wanted to, but Volvo being Volvo, it’s all about safety, rather than showing off. And certainly, the ease of driving the XC90 makes it much less tiring, less stressful and less likely to drive you to divorce than any other car we’ve tried.

And so to the ultimate question: would we buy this car? It was designed exactly for this purpose – effortlessly eating up the endless kilometres on the autoroutes in style and comfort, kids and kit stowed comfortably, mum and dad up front fiddling with the massage settings, happy. The D5 diesel is the option to choose here – the hybrid T8 is incredibly quick, and great for company car tax rates, but the once your plug-in battery is drained, you’re left with a heavier version of the standard petrol version.

There is a lot to love, but there are a few minor gripes too. As with any SUV, you notice yourself needing to take the corners a little slower than in a lower-slung sporty estate. And the sound system isn’t quite as punchy as the BMW version we’re used to – though for £825 Volvo will give you a Harman Kardon speaker upgrade, though the sound of the Bowers & Wilkins option had better sound as astonishing as the £3,000 price. And cars with buttons and dials may be a bit retro for some but you can fiddle with them while driving with less distraction than a series of menus on the huge touch screen that controls pretty much everything.

The model we drove, the D5 Inscription, costs £54,885 before extras such as the steering assist are added – our car would have set us back £57,285. But that’s cheaper than a Q7 with similar bells and whistles, by some way.

And there’s another comparison to make. Compared with the flights (not forgetting the excess luggage) and a hire car we can fit into, we’ve slashed more than £3,000 off the trip – even with tolls and diesel. Which would make the monthly payments of around £800 on a PCP finance deal seem more justifiable.

But here’s the real win – not just for this car but for driving vs flying in general: by driving there through Friday night, rather than spending the whole of Saturday travelling, we had a full extra day on the slopes. Just don’t ask me to drive all that way in our existing car.

For more information, visit the Volvo website