Volvo XC60 T8 Recharge – long-term review

Ok, I’m going to have to admit it, I’m a virgin. This is my first experience of charging up an electrified car.

And, like many of our readers, I suspect I’m not alone. Ther are almost 69 million of us in the UK, but even in the dire car sales year that was 2020, when EV sales rocketed, plug-in hybrids and full EVs only made up 8 per cent of total car sales in the UK.

I’ll also confess I actually think a PHEV makes more sense in the short term, while we get to grips with creating an infrastructure that actually supports electric cars. Currently, I average 16 miles a day – just short of the UK average of 20.3 (DfT, 2019) – which is doing the school run every day, twice.

You get about 30 miles of battery in the XC60, and if I didn’t go anywhere else I’d only need to charge it every other day. That’s if you can be bothered to charge it every day. The first time I came to charge, I’ll freely admit I didn’t really know what I was doing. Can I just plug it in to my mains? What if I blow my circuit box up?

What if the whole street goes down with a power surge and my 90-year-old neighbour Bernard misses Homes Under the Hammer? Oh god, it’s starting to rain, can I charge it in the rain? Turns out, you can.

With the car comes a bag with two cables, one for home charging and another for charging stations. The instruction book is so simple it looks like an Ikea instruction manual. I figured it wouldn’t have a three-point plug if it wasn’t allowed to be plugged in to the mains, so I pushed open the charge flap, plugged it in and hoped for the best. A series of lights indicate if it’s working – green is good – while a display on the dash tells you how long to go. Seven hours, supposedly.

Only real snag is, if you have to park on the street you need to run a long extension cable across the pavement. Oh no, what if Bernard trips over and dies? Stressful, these cars of the future...