Volvo ES90 2026 review | An electric saloon with a long range and very fast charging

What is the Volvo ES90

Saloon cars have never been Volvo’s stock in trade. Once it was known for its roomy estates; nowadays its big, plush SUVs rule the roost. Saloons, however, have never really been a Volvo thing.

And yet Volvo saloons have long found a small but loyal niche; lovers of the comfort and plushness that mark out all Volvos, but who prefer the more elegant lines of a four-door.

Indeed, Volvo can trace a lengthy lineage of big, luxurious saloon cars right back to the PV36 of the 1930s, through the more recent 900-series and S80 models, to its last, the S90, which went out of production in 2024.

And this, the new ES90, is intended to continue that line. As the name suggests, it’s an electric successor to the S90, but this car is a little different.

For one thing, it’s more like a crossover in stature, with a sharply truncated tail and a ride height that’s around 10cm higher than a normal saloon.

For another, there’s a yawning, hatchback boot opening instead of the more limited saloon-style opening, which is intended to meet Volvo’s loyal estate buyers – who won’t get their own version of the ES90 – somewhere in the middle.

How practical is it?

Immediately, there’s a problem. Volvos are known for their practicality, and especially in estate form, for offering oodles of boot space. Yet on that front, the ES90 falls short.

For a car of this size, the 424-litre boot feels remarkably stingy. By comparison, BMW’s i5 saloon gives you 490 litres to play with, while the i5 Touring gets a whopping 570 litres; even the smaller Polestar 4 has 100 litres more than the ES90.

Then there are the rear seats, which fold down in a useful 40/20/40 format like Volvos of old, but - oddly - while the left-hand and centre seat fold down independently, you can’t fold the right-hand one down without also folding down the centre seat, because they latch together.

On the plus side, that hatchback tail means you do get to make good use of what space there is; loading larger items in with the seats down is a doddle.

The rear seats themselves are roomy enough for passengers, with lots of space between them and the front seats to allow for long legs. Trouble is, they’re mounted quite high up, which means taller occupants’ heads can end up brushing the ceiling.

The seat squab is positioned quite low to the high floor, too, which pushes passengers’ knees upward, increasing the angle of their hips and the curvature of their spine: this might make the rear seats a tiring place to spend time on a longer journey.

The height of the floor also causes problems up front, where the actual space for you to climb in between it and the cant rail (that's where the roof meets the side of the car) is quite narrow, so you have to take care to avoid clouting your head on the way in. The bulkhead feels quite close to you, too, so you feel the need to set the seat back a ways, eating into that rear seat leg-room.

Once ensconced, however, the ES90 is a truly lovely place to be, equipped with some of the comfiest seats and trimmed in some of the finest materials this side of a Bentley. The light, open-pore birch wood trim, splashed liberally around the cockpit, is a particular highlight.

What’s it like to drive?

Even the most basic ES90 gives a whopping range and super-fast charging speeds. This is the Single Motor Extended Range model, which gets a usable battery capacity of 88kWh, enough for an official range of 407 miles (expect more like 300-320 in the real world).

It’ll charge at up to 310kW, which means on a charger that can match that speed, it’ll get from 10 to 80 per cent in just 23 minutes. That’s pretty impressive when you consider that you’ll gain around 200 miles of real-world range in that time, and it means even the entry-level ES90 should theoretically be able to undertake a 500-mile journey in a day with only one relatively quick charging stop.

But if that’s not enough, you can always upgrade to the Twin Motor version. This features 102kWh of usable battery capacity, which means it’s capable of 432 miles between charges, officially. In the real world, that’ll probably work out to somewhere between 330 and 350 miles.

Charging speeds of up to 350kW mean this version will again charge from 10 to 80 per cent in as little as 23 minutes, provided the charger can match the car’s speeds. That means the Twin Motor can pack in around 220 miles of real-world range in the same time as the Single Motor will get to 200.

Upgrading further to the Twin Motor Performance doesn’t bring any increase in battery capacity or charging speed, which means its range and charging stats are the same as the standard Twin Motor.

What differentiates the Performance model from the standard Twin Motor is, somewhat unsurprisingly, its performance. This model gives you a thumping 671bhp underfoot, which is enough to accelerate it to 62mph from a standstill in a faintly shocking four seconds dead.

Do you really need all that performance? Well, consider that even the ‘ordinary’ Twin Motor offers up 449bhp, which gets it to 62mph in just 5.5 seconds. Mind you, for most people, the Single Motor’s 329bhp output and 6.6-second 0-62mph time will probably be more than enough.

Whichever ES90 you choose, you get a car that’s perfectly decent to drive, if nothing special. It does an admirable job of resisting body lean, there’s loads of grip, and the ES90 changes direction crisply. You don’t get an awful lot of feedback through the controls, though, and as a result, you won’t be buying an ES90 if an ability to scythe through corners deftly is at the top of your list of requirements.

But then, you probably knew that already: after all, Volvo drivers don’t tend to come to the brand looking for a capacity to thrill. Instead, they come to Volvo for comfort, and on this front, the ES90 delivers. To a point.

A caveat, first: the ES90 we test-drove was an Ultra model, which gets air suspension as standard. As with an air mattress, this provides brilliant cushioning over bumps, and consequently, the ES90 lopes along beautifully at higher speeds, smearing along motorways with contempt for divots and undulations.

The trouble is, air suspension can’t react very quickly to more sudden bumps, which means it struggles over the rough stretches of Tarmac and sharper-edged potholes you get on urban roads and single-carriageway lanes.

And when fitted with the optional 22-inch wheels, as our test car was, this characteristic is magnified. As a result, the car we drove had a tendency to transmit quite a few of the more substantial shocks at lower speeds through to the driver’s backside, which made for an unpleasant and unwelcome contrast with the smooth ride at cruising speeds.

We’ve yet to try the ES90 Plus, which runs on smaller wheels and steel suspension; this might solve the problem. We’ll let you know as soon as we do.

Due to the narrow windows and thick door pillars, visibility in the ES90 isn’t the best. The worst part is the view out of the rear, which is astonishingly poor; thick rear-window pillars, a low roof and huge rear headrests that sit right in your eye-line leave nothing but a couple of comically small gaps, through which you get barely any view of the road behind you whatsoever.

Thankfully, parking an ES90 isn’t too hard thanks to the gamut of cameras and parking sensors, but the sub-par view out does mean you do have to rely on these more than you might like to.

Technology, equipment & infotainment

If you want to own an ES90, you’ll have to be pretty au fait with touchscreens. That’s because almost all of the ES90’s functions are operated through the huge, 14.5-inch, portrait-oriented central screen.

On the plus side, its sheer size means that hitting icons on this screen isn’t too distracting. But Volvo’s latest software is slightly too clever for its own good. You see, there are rows of shortcut buttons that are intended to help you quickly and easily access the functions you use regularly. The trouble is, the system changes these buttons around depending on whether the car is stationary or in motion. The effect of this is that you sometimes go to prod an icon, only to realise that because the car has stopped, it’s no longer there.

What’s more, an over-reliance on the screen means it sometimes takes too long to do the thing you want to do. Even simple functions – for example, adjusting the temperature of the climate control, for which there are no separate physical buttons – can take three or four prods at icons on the screen. Meanwhile, the way Volvo has buried the lighting functions in a menu, rather than giving you a simple switch, makes it a faff to turn them on. That’s something you don’t really want just as the weather is closing in and visibility is dropping, when you really want to be focussed on the road ahead.

And the thing is, there's a dizzying amount menus, because there’s a lot to control. The ES90 is positioned squarely in the luxury market, but even by those standards, it gets a pretty lavish equipment list. Even the entry-level Plus version comes with a heat pump, four-zone climate control, heated front and rear seats, a heated steering wheel, and even heated wiper blades. There’s a Bose sound system, a 360-degree parking camera, a fixed panoramic roof, 20-inch wheels, that lovely wood trim, sustainable leather-effect upholstery, and wireless Apple Carplay and Android Auto.

Upgrading to the top-of-the-range Ultra gets you an electrochromic panoramic roof that can turn opaque at the press of a switch, a Bowers & Wilkins upgraded sound system, ventilated front and rear seats, massage front seats, air suspension, and 21-inch wheels.

Volvo ES90 running costs

To find your way into an ES90 as a private buyer, you’ll have to fork out more than £67,000, which puts it almost exactly on a par with the entry-level BMW i5: itself quite a pricey beast.

That said, the comparison is not entirely fair, because you get a lot more equipment thrown in with the entry-level Volvo. Indeed, to up the i5 Sport Edition’s specification to match it, you’d have to spend around £8,000 on top of that initial asking price, and with that in mind, the ES90 starts to look like fairly decent value.

What’s more, the ES90 will actually cost you less than a Mercedes-Benz EQE. And while the entry-level Audi A6 E-Tron Sportback is cheaper still, it can’t match the ES90 on range or performance.

The ES90’s energy efficiency figure of four miles per kilowatt hour (mpkWh), meanwhile, looks pretty reasonable, especially for such a big, heavy car. This figure puts it roughly in the middle of all of its equivalent rivals.

Volvo specifies a servicing schedule of every 24 months or 18,000 miles, whichever crops up first. That’s roughly on a par with most other EVs, although the mileage limit is slightly lower than usual, which means if you’re a high-mileage driver, you may end up having to service your ES90 slightly more frequently than you would a comparable rival.

Meanwhile, VED should be the same on the ES90 as any other large electric luxury saloon, given they all incur the premium car surcharge levied on electric cars costing more than £50,000.

Company car tax should be pretty reasonable, too, given that the ES90's P11D value will be lower like-for-like than most of its rivals. However, if you can live with the lower range and lesser performance of the entry-level A6 E-Tron Sportback, that'll be even cheaper to tax.

Volvo ES90 reliability

Volvo has a pretty good reputation for reliability – but if reliability studies are to be believed, it isn’t entirely deserved. Take the 2025 What Car? Reliability Survey, for example. This placed Volvo 21st out of the 30 manufacturers to be included, with a score of 90.9%. That might not sound too bad, but when you consider the lowest score was 88.9%, it isn’t wonderful.

Mind you, a bit of context is needed. Premium car makers tend not to fare so well in these surveys because parts are pricey and there’s lots to go wrong with high-specification cars. With that in mind, Volvo actually finished above Mercedes and Audi, which came joint 22nd. It was still beaten by Porsche, BMW, Lexus, and even Alfa Romeo: all premium car-makers that seem to make a better fist of their cars’ dependability.

Volvo’s warranty is also one of the least generous of any current brand. You get three years or 60,000 miles, which is about the bare minimum you can expect these days. Its premium rivals’ offerings don’t tend to be much better: Audi's offering is exactly the same, but BMW and Mercedes do at least all offer unlimited-mileage cover with their three-year warranties.

Meanwhile, Genesis will offer you a five-year warranty on its big, comfy Electrified G80 saloon. That’s probably the way to go if you want a premium saloon car with the peace-of-mind of a longer warranty. Then there’s Lexus, which doesn’t yet make a direct rival to the ES90, but will warrant your car for up to a whopping 10 years(or 100,000 miles) if you service it at a Lexus dealership. All of which makes Volvo’s warranty look a little weak.