The 2019 Volvo S60 is Swedish style at a surprisingly good price

Jonathan Gitlin

They say the sedan is dead and that the public only wants crossovers and SUVs now. If true, that’s really too bad, because I think we’re in something of a golden era for the four-door. At the cheaper end of the market, you can’t beat the new Honda Accord. Increase the MSRP a little—cars starting in the mid 30s, say—and it’s hard to find a clear winner because we’re spoiled for choice. And now that choice is a little harder thanks to this: the new Volvo S60.

This is Volvo’s first American-made car, built at a new plant in Charleston, South Carolina. And it’s the latest car to use Volvo’s Scalable Product Architecture, the toolkit that also gave us the XC60 SUV, plus the bigger S90 sedan, V90 wagon, and XC90 SUV. We’ve been quite taken with each of the previous SPA Volvos we’ve tested; they’ve looked good, felt well-screwed together, and the Sensus infotainment system is better than most. (If you follow those links you can read about all that in greater depth.) As a rule, I prefer smaller vehicles to larger ones and cars to SUVs, so the S60 (and the new V60 wagon you can read about tomorrow) have been the SPA cars I’ve been waiting for.