Snow worries for V50

Volvo's new all-wheel drive V50 can survive rather more than the average British winter.

A MASSIVE lorry overtakes my Volvo test car, briefly shrouding my vision in a cloud of thrown-up spray and forcing me to come off the throttle, dropping my speed below 50mph. Unremarkable? Maybe, except that the road in front of me - the main route between the two major towns of the region - consists of two dirty brown lines in a sea of white, for that spray is snow. It reminds me of a night on the M25 some years ago, except that then a single fall of the white stuff brought the motorway, and in fact the whole of south-east England, to a grinding, helpless halt.

I am not on the M25 today - I am in fact 150 miles inside the Arctic Circle, the northernmost region of Finland. It is here, where daylight is a short respite between greyness and darkness, and where the temperature seldom climbs close to freezing, that Volvo has flown a party of UK journalists to show them just how good is the new all-wheel drive version of the recently launched V50 estate. Over the space of two days they prove their point - thoroughly.

The car will already be familiar as a far more stylish replacement for the V40 - certainly it impressed me on my first drive in Scotland last year. Now the AWD arrives to take up the role of flagship model, thanks to its combination of all-wheel grip and the T5 2.5-litre five cylinder turbocharged petrol engine. It's on sale now in Sport, SE and SE Sport trim levels, and certainly fulfils the role of stylish executive load carrier.

It is, however, the technology under the skin that is most to our concern on this trip. The all-wheel drive unit is a Haldex system, as used in Volvo's phenomenally successful XC90 SUV - it's easy to tell the V50 AWD over its siblings as accommodating the propshaft between front and rear axles requires it to sit somewhat higher off the ground. Stiffer anti-roll bard keep the handling sweet.

In normal use the car is basically front-wheel drive, but courtesy of a clever electrically operated hydraulic clutch traction can be varied between the front and rear wheels. It all works very quickly - the rear wheels can be receiving all of the drive before a spinning front wheel has managed quarter of a turn. It's combined with Volvo's TRACS traction control system. Working separately on front and rear axles, this system will automatically brake a wheel that starts spinning, therefore giving complete independent control to each wheel.

Does it work? Boy does it work. Volvo's proof consisted of first taking us to the Mellatracks test centre. Now I should say immediately that these cars were not quite to UK specification, in one sense. They had studded tyres fitted, basically a requirement in this part of the world where by far the majority of your time is spent driving on nothing but packed snow. But should we get a heavy fall in the UK (and the nearer we get to Spring the more likely it is in our mixed-up climate) then fit snow chains to your UK Volvo and you should be able to achieve much of what we did in Finland.

This included slaloming our V50s down what from a distance looked like an airport runway, cleared in the snowy surroundings. In fact it was a mile of sheet ice, the sort of surface you simply shouldn't be able to drive over. But while strange and oddly worrying grinding and clunking sounds came from underneath the car as the all-wheel drive electronics combined with such stock features as the ABS brakes, the result was very impressive, it being very easy to weave our way round the cones, a sort of ballet on ice.

We also got to drive around a handling circuit, again a track marked out in the snow but the V50 oozing confidence, so much so that we set out confidently next day on a road route that took us towards Murmansk and right up to the Russian border. But we baulked slightly when the directions pointed us down a 'forest road - no overtaking'. More snow had fallen overnight and this 'road' looked more like an Alpine ski run.

We needn't have worried - the V50 coped wonderfully, even when the route consisted of following the six-inch deep ruts in fresh snow made by the vehicle in front.  Never once did we feel in any danger - only wonder at driving through woodland in conditions that would have UK traffic advisers pleading with everyone to stay indoors. It was certainly an eye-opener.

The V50 acquitted itself magnificently in the extreme conditions of Finland. It would be equally at home, and equally confidence-inducing, in the rainy, slushy and slippery conditions of a typical English country road. If you want an estate with plenty of style and executive refinement, but also the ability to get you to your destination whatever the conditions, then the V50 T50 AWD could well be for you.

* During our visit to Finland we also got to try out the latest version of the XC90 SUV, the V8, offering up a very useful 315bhp. It proved a very impressive beast not bothered at all by the snowy conditions, but sadly it's not currently coming to the UK. Volvo tells us, however that research into moving the engine to accommodate a right-hand drive setup is being investigated. Watch this space...