Volvo Concepts 40.1 and 40.2 First Look: Previewing the Next XC40
The Shoe(s) Finally Drop
In writing, analogies help us mortar-together our often awkward brick-piles of facts and observations. And when a car designer tries his hand with analogies, you know he's likely to tell it using props as well.
Volvo's senior vice president of design, Thomas Ingenlath, stood in front of a pair of narrow, white tables, with little white sheets covering whatever was resting on them. What's his story going to be? And what are those small lumps under the sheets?
Smiling, he described premium brands traditionally approach the problem of fashioning a family of cars in different sizes: make the middle one identical to the biggest, but scaled down. Then—and no, this is not very clever—shrink the smallest one even further. With a whip of his hand, off went one of the little sheets to reveal three pairs of identical, polished black dress shoes. Except for their decreasing sizes and the dropping numbers above each pair—"90," "60," and "40." This, Ingenlath explained, is not how Volvo is approaching its two upcoming model ranges, the still-secret XC60 and the two 40-series concepts we were about to see. As an analogy guy, I was getting excited.
With a flourish, the other sheet flew off. There's the same big handsome dress shoe again under the "90" (if the shoe fits, well, you know.) However this time its "60" companion is more casual footwear—still nicely styled, but more relaxed. A lower heel; the top stitched from more breathable, open-pore leather. But next to that, below the "40" number?
A fancy white leather sneaker. I gasped. Then the sheets came off two white concepts cars labeled 40.1 and 40.2. The first is a crossover, though Volvo calls it a small SUV (the driver's eye-perch is too lofty to be confused with mere vertically-puffed sedans). The other, the 40.2, is an unusually tall, liftback sedan. We expected this 40.1, with the production Volvo XC40 probably already in the pipeline toward an on-sale date later in 2017. But the 40.2 had us covering our mouths in surprise. Nobody knew about this one.
Both concepts resonate more with rock-climbing than tennis, more paddle-boarding than sailing. And way, way, younger drivers. Unlike the beveled, somber grace of the XC90 and the S90, the 40.1 and 40.2 are stark, fractured ice sculptures. With cleaved flanks and intense Thor's Hammer LED headlights; war-paint black-and-white faces and fat taillights that look like they were paint-rollered on. The shoulder lines are impossibly high and scary sharp-edged; the concave light-catchers above the rocker panels look like blunt impressions from a 2x4; the 40.1's black-plastic roof extension is half the size of a trash can lid. Though they're festooned with Volvo design cues, you'll never ever walk past them in the Neiman Marcus lot wondering, goodness gracious, wherever did I leave it? Later at dinner, we were asked which concept we liked better—most hands raised for the tall sedan, though Volvo's priority (naturally) is the SUV.
