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PT KONTAK PERKASA FUTURES BANDUNG - The subtle simplicity
and purity of Scandinavian design has been admired for decades, largely
in terms of household items and furniture, useful objects made of wood,
wool, leather, stone, and other natural materials. Scandinavian
automobiles—Swedish ones, as far as nameplates go, though Valmet built
more than 225,000 Porsches in Finland—have been admired for various
qualities. Those include very early and very seriously applied safety
consciousness on the part of both Volvo and Saab, first to offer
shoulder belts in series production—as well as applied aerodynamics, in
the latter’s case.
Volvo’s very conventional engineering
design—the firm never went to independent rear suspension in its
rear-drive models—has been admirable, but its cars have never really
been known for style. Once very much the product of T-square and
triangle orthographic shaping, Volvos got better with the arrival of
Peter Horbury as chief designer in 1991, and for a long time his
positive influence led to attractive, professional shapes that were
sensible and practical but never quite beautiful.
To Automobile,
Volvo’s latest designs—derived from a series of brilliant concept cars
shown in recent years by the now Chinese-owned firm—are indeed beautiful
in a reserved but admirable way. They are neither spectacular nor
voluptuous, but they possess a distinguished elegance and restrained
classical appeal. This comprehensible, easily appreciated, enduring
beauty gives Volvo a promising new start.
On the 2017 Volvo S90,
a long, crisp line running from the headlamps back to a sharp corner at
the rear of the body provides emphasis on apparent length. This new
look is part of a wholesale restructuring of Volvo’s product line,
reducing a staggering variety of powerplants to just two—the 2.0-liter
four-cylinder seen in the three 90-series models now, and a
three-cylinder engine not yet in production but acknowledged as being in
development. Volvo will offer each base engine in varying states of
tune, thereby providing a range of power adequate for its full line of
cars and SUVs.
Since 2012, Volvo’s new non-Scandinavian design leadership has come from Thomas Ingenlath,
an ex-Volkswagen Group German with solid experience at Audi, Škoda, and
VW. Likewise Robin Page, an ex-Bentley/Rolls-Royce Briton. The new
regime has somehow managed to absorb, integrate, and successfully marry
traditional Scandinavian design sensibility, and then marry it to a
fluid, international automotive style with just a deft touch of the
surfacing restraint that characterized many past Volvo designs. Those
tended to avoid deep-draw or complex stampings—to the point of excess in
the early 1990s. There is fluidity to the S90 that is aerodynamically
efficient and aesthetically convincing, making this excellent four-door
sedan and its closely related V90 wagon handsome alternatives to more
popular luxury cars.
Let’s look at some of the details. There’s the grille, about which we said in By Design in April 2016:
“This is by far the nicest grille any Volvo has ever sported.” There
are many reasons, but an overriding one is that the grille assembly
gives the impression of being carefully wrought in solid metal. Most
grilles today are actually plastic injection moldings with a bright
finish, but some observers like to believe they’re really solid brass,
highly polished, and then thickly chrome-plated. That might once have
been the case, but with today’s concerns for lightweight parts to
improve fuel economy, plastic is the proper answer. Many past Volvo
grilles were light and cheap aluminum stampings that looked light and
cheap. This one seems rather substantial, giving the whole car an air of
seriousness. Apart from the impression of material quality, the
slightly concave vertical grille bars provide a nice backing texture to
the diagonal slash through the grille that was part of the appearance of
the first Volvo car in 1927 and reappeared for the boxy 140-series
models 50 years ago.
Or consider the headlamps, actually quite
simple assemblies that wrap around the chamfered front corners of the
car, their daytime running lights emphasizing the grille’s horizontal
element and leading to the key body-side line mentioned earlier. The
effect is to make the car look wider than it is, adding substance to the
whole. Rectangular vents beneath the headlamps are set well below the
grille, allowing a broad swath of painted skin to sweep across the front
end under the grille, again giving a strong impression of more width
than is actually present. With an unobtrusive opening just above a
visual baseplate at the bottom of the nose, there is adequate area for
air ingestion, without the ridiculously large grille taken up first by
Audi, then in misshapen and grotesquely oversized form by both Lexus and
Infiniti.
It is important, finally, that Volvo designers felt no
need to exaggerate anything about this car to attract attention. No
baleen-whale plankton strainer on the front, no rocket nozzles on the
rear, no four-color paint jobs, no metal or plastic goiters stuck into
the sides. This is an understated, wholly balanced form that was
specifically created not to shock, startle, or stimulate. It is meant to
navigate the streets, roads, and superhighways of the normal world
without distressing anyone, above all the people who purchase and use
the S90. They get solid, safe, sensible, and satisfying normal
transportation, not a mechanical manifestation of someone’s fevered
fantasy of what a car should be.
Volvo S90s are easy to look at,
and easy to drive with plenty of electronic aides to keep them from
running off the road, rear-ending a car ahead, or behaving badly in poor
weather conditions. In a year where most manufacturers have directed
their efforts to SUVs or extravagant performance models, Volvo has, without ignoring the vital SUV segment (see XC90), come up with a truly superior traditional sedan fully worthy of being our Design of the Year.
Design Analysis
1. This sharp
longitudinal line separates an inverse curve above and a gently swelling
convex surface below, which in turn flows into a concave area on the
doors, making the body sides more complex to look at but not difficult
to stamp and without presenting any additional drag.
2.
This crisp line emerges from a rounded surface and continues to a sharp
intersection with an equally hard transverse line at the peak of the
rear fascia that acts as a spoiler. This gives a clear highlight along
the entire length of the body, helping the car look longer than it
really is. Long and low is always good.
3. This
is indeed the best grille any Volvo has ever carried. Its multiple
concave vertical bars are spaced perfectly, the perimeter is clean and
not overly simple, and the diagonal slash through the badge goes back to
Volvo’s beginning in 1927.
4. The bottom-feeder
“catfish mouth” is emphasized by the horizontal blade running the full
width of the front end at the very bottom of the front clip of fenders,
hood, and grille. Sculpting of the various inlets on the fascia is
carefully done and reminds one of the shape of wooden carving boards in
the Scandinavian style.
5. There is a great deal
of subtle modeling involved in these lower corner scoops, crisp at their
outer edges, flowing softly into the horizontal brightwork above the
low-mounted lamps.
6. Admirably
slim, the A-pillars are much more in the mode of sports cars than family
sedans, supplying unusual grace to the S90’s profile. They lean more
sharply back than has ever before been Volvo practice, and they lead
into a roof profile at the centerline that is quite sporty and, of
course, aerodynamically desirable.
7. Volvo’s
body-safety engineering is real but unobtrusive. Substantial B- and
C-pillars are blacked out to be quietly self-effacing. The result is
that one “reads” the side glass profile as a single graceful form,
essentially not seeing the strong members that assure stiffness in a
roll-over crash.
8. The hard intersection of this
transverse line with the side line at a sharp point is a little
surprising, but the intersection line moves down the taillight lens and
then, in paint, sweeps across the back, making a clear break between
side and rear and giving a good horizontal transverse line in the bumper
strike face.
9. Exhaust outlets are framed in
chrome, and their substantial size alludes to the great amount of power
in the supercharged/turbocharged/electric version.
10.
These surface breaks, the upper one aligned with the side chrome trim
and much crisper than the lower, connect the sides and rear fascia with
visual emphasis on overall length, which seems to have been an
overriding concern in developing the shape.
11. The 9-inch
nav screen is usefully large, and the vertical orientation quicker to
read than a horizontal one, according to numerous studies done for
airliners and military aircraft.
12.
Light-colored wood has long been an important part of Scandinavian
decorating in homes and offices, and its application here with generous
radii at the top edges evokes that tradition in a positive and agreeable
way.
Source : automobilemag.com