The Volvo S60 Polestar is a bargain at ₹52.5 lac

The Volvo S60 Polestar is a bargain at ₹52.5 lac

367hp, 470Nm, four doors and a boot for you to resent your runts a little less

The new S60 Polestar is now available in India, and by all indications, it’s a riot! Volvo claims it’s their quickest car yet. That’s not saying much in a country where you can buy just about any warp-speed exotic you might imagine, but it’s a big deal for the Swedish-Chinese manufacturer, traditionally known for their world-leading safety. This also makes them the underdog, and I’m a sucker for the underdog.

In a sense, buying an S60 Polestar is going to put you in a rather exclusive club. For one, Volvo has a small sales setup, which precludes many buyers. You see a few in the wild, but nowhere near the numbers of their European cousins. Also, the Polestar range – Polestar is Volvo’s performance arm, as AMG is to Mercedes – only started being offered to the general public in 2014, so there just aren’t as many around.

They do know what they’re doing, however. The S60 Polestar is 20kg lighter than the standard sedan, uses a high-tech turbo+supercharged 2.0-litre four-cylinder motor generating 367hp and 470Nm of torque and delivers it through a specially-tuned 8-speed automatic transmission through a BorgWarner AWD system – again tuned by Polestar for more rear bias. 0–100kmph comes up in 4.7 seconds. I want to have children just to have an excuse for wild joyrides in this wild blue sedan. Wait, no; children are more expensive in the long run, and add weight.

It’s available in black and white as well, but this blue is the colour to have.

Of particular note is that Volvo is offering their radar-based safety features in India now, thanks to the recent de-licensing of the frequencies required. This means you get adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning, collision warning with full auto-braking for pedestrians, cyclists, other vehicles and large animals, blind-spot detection with cross traffic alert, city safety and park pilot assist. We do hope you can turn most of those off, or the car is likely to automatically stay on its big Brembo brakes all the time, in our traffic.

The big news is that all this is available at an ex-showroom price of ₹52.5 lac, making this some serious bang for the buck, while retaining all the seats you need to ferry your children and their friends while scaring them silly. We advise against using launch control in a school zone, however.