Eat My Cardigan
Newcastle Herald
Saturday March 23, 2002
T HE old Falcon, all mag wheels, primer, exhaust note and killer stereo, sidled up at the lights.
I looked across, read the driver's thoughts. They were not a good read.
`Silly old fart in a Volvo,' the words seemed to say, filtered ever so by the `boom-boom-boom' of the trillion-watt audio.
Falcon driver scrunches up in the seat as the lights hit their change sequence, revs rise, pulse rate quickens.
And something inside me suggested this would be a good time ? perhaps the perfect time ? to test the acceleration potential of Volvo's S80 T6.
Perhaps my road companion in the Falcon had not read the specifications of the S80 T6 (henceforth referred to simply as T6 for reasons of brevity) because if he had he might not have been so willing to put his paltry kiloWatts up against my big ones.
If I could have communicated with him I would have been able to tell him that hiding under the long bonnet of the Swedish battleship was a 2.8-litre, inline six-cylinder engine with double overhead camshafts, four valves for each cylinder and two turbochargers. Count 'em.
I would have told him, quite happily, that all this mechanical complication delivered 200kW to the front wheels every time the tachometer spun to 5400rpm and the torque figure, that set of numbers which defines a vehicle's ability to pull, was 380Nm developed at 2000rpm and staying there until the needle flicked past 5000rpm, at which point it tails off just a little to let the kiloWatts out to play.
That particular time might have been appropriate to explain the workings of Volvo's Geartronic automatic transmission, a swish, electronically controlled device that allows the drive to select `D' for drive and let the transmission sort out its own affairs or pull the shift lever way back.
Doing that little exercise selects the appropriate forward gear and the transmission will change up or down only if commanded to do. Continued on Page 54
© 2002 Newcastle Herald
