Volvos have been good-looking long enough to banish the sensible-shoes image that has dogged the Swedish brand for decades. We can thank Brit designer Peter Horbury for sculpting the once slab-sided boxes into sleek shapes while maintaining their uniquely Volvo design cues.
Horbury is now trying to slap Ford design into shape, while Volvo Cars design director Steve Mattin keeps the fires burning. The new Volvo S40 surely looks wonderful, even more so than its parts-bin cousin, the Mazda 3. But even though the S40 lit a spark in our collective campfire when we first drove it, we needed to live with one to be sure that Volvo truly had made the great leap from sturdy appliance to desirable, sporting sedan. So we slid a passion red S40 sedan into the Four Seasons fleet, right between our sporty Mazda RX-8 and a big Nissan Titan pickup. Twelve months, dozens of enthusiastic drivers, several children, and 30,839 miles in thirty states ranging from Maine to Florida to Washington gave us the answer.... Read full article