We show how you can customize the Autoblog 2020 Volvo S60 long-termer's driver assist systems.
TranscriptBYRON HERD: Hey, everybody. Welcome to this Autoblog long term update social distancing edition. I am Associate Editor, Byron Herd. And you are joining me in the cabin of our long term Volvo S S60 T8 inscription.
So this is the plug-in hybrid S60. It's got 400 horsepower and it behaves like EV sometimes. All those things are pretty cool. But the thing I'm here to talk to you about today is actually the infotainment system, more specifically the options that exist within it for customizing all the fancy driver aides that this car has.
This has semi-autonomous highways self-driving capability. So it has tons of sensors, tons of gizmos, and tons of different modes all working together to make it possible for you to go down the highway with minimal effort.
The thing that bothers me about a lot of those systems is that they're usually either all or nothing. So one of the things I love about this car is that it lets you do almost everything completely ala carte. It's all customizable and I'm going to show you how.
OK. So I've already got the car started up and going here just because I didn't want you guys have to sit through all the boot up process for all the software. So as you can see, we'll get a nice freshly cleaned screen here.
So we're going to fire this up and go to the home page. And then with one swipe, we have our customization panel. From here, we can turn on or off basically everything that this car has. You can change settings for everything, the HUD, sport mode, stability control roadside information, all of the collision detection and avoidance systems, all of them.
It's all ala carte. You can have it exactly the way you want it at any given time. For example, now this is one of my favorites. I generally don't like the adaptive automatic radar guided cruise control modes. When a car is in front of me, I know how to slow down.
When a car gets out of the way, I know how to speed back. I don't want the car doing it for me. It tends to be clunky. It tends to hesitate. The Volvo's pretty good at it, but it's still not great. So I can switch this over to regular cruise control. And as you can see, it says no cruise adaptation to other vehicles meaning.
It's just going to go the speed I said it until I either run into something, which it should actually technically prevent, or until I tell the system to do something other than that. So just with that, one simple thing, it completely changes the way the car operates without interfering with other things.
Blindspot mode, on/off has no bearing whatsoever on the cruise control. Roadside information, on or off, same deal. I can change almost everything in here and still have access to the things I want without impacting how anything performs.
By no means is this Volvo entertainment system perfect. To be perfectly honest, there are a lot of issues with it. You have to dig through menus. It's kind of finicky to access certain things. Things that, as you're cruising along, even on a highway, your tends to be bouncing around a lot.
So you want to fiddle with this stuff while you're parked or waiting at a red light or something like that. You don't want to be trying to dig through to find all these things as a cruising along. That's one of my major digs against it.
I'm also not thrilled with the smartphone integration in this, which can be described as finicky on a good day. So these are just a few of the features that make Volvo's S60 such a good highway cruiser. For being a small luxury car, it's comfortable. It's quiet. And it gives you all this technology that's useful and versatile. It's really hard to beat. As a total luxury package, one of my favorites.
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