How Well Do the Volvo XC90's Safety Systems Work?

CARS.COM — It’s no secret that the Cars.com editors and the 2016 Volvo XC90 are fond of each other. We gave it our Best of 2016 award and then went out and bought one to test for a year, as is our tradition with our Best of winners.

Part of the XC90’s appeal is its safety technology. Volvo’s Vision 2020 initiative — that no one should be killed or seriously injured in a new Volvo car — is an ambitious swing for the fences. The XC90 is the latest step in that direction, offering many safety features and driver aids. While we (thankfully) haven’t tested the XC90’s crash-worthiness or how its numerous passive safety features work in the event of a collision, the past few months with the SUV have given our editors a chance to get to know the active safety features better.

Related: 2016 Volvo XC90: The Safety Hype Is Real

The 2016 XC90 T6 Inscription that we purchased a few months ago came with lots of standard safety equipment, including City Safety (more on this later), forward collision warning with full automatic braking, active high-beam headlights, bending headlights and a backup camera. Our XC90 also features the Vision and Convenience packages. The former adds a surround-view monitor and blind spot warning system, while latter brings adaptive cruise control with Pilot Assist, lane keeping aid and semi-automated parking. 

Like most of the XC90’s systems, the safety technology is controlled via the Sensus touch-screen. Swiping to the right opens a menu where you can toggle the various driver aids on and off. And the system is persistent — it will remember if you turned a feature on or off, and it retains that preference the next time the car is started. It’s a common-sense feature that’s less, well, common than you’d think.

Camera Systems

The XC90’s camera system is comprised of the rear-facing backup camera as well as cameras on each side of the XC90 for the surround-view monitor system. The massive multimedia screen displays a high-resolution picture, and the multiple views come in handy for parking, whether in top-down or rear-only view, which comes with active guidelines.

Senior editor Mike Hanley did note that keeping the cameras clean has been a challenge in winter – they accumulate grime (like salt and dirt), which clouds the lenses and degrades the picture quality.

Adaptive Cruise Control With Lane Keeping

The adaptive cruise control system and lane keeping assist are powered by forward-facing radar and cameras. Adaptive cruise works all the way from a stop, while lane keeping offers warnings when the XC90 starts to drift out of a lane and uses small course corrections to try to keep the vehicle in the lane at speeds faster than 40 mph. Under that speed, Pilot Assist kicks in; Pilot Assist will be discussed in-depth in the next section.

Assistant Managing Editor Jennifer Geiger was not a fan of the lane departure system, finding it too aggressive. “In areas where the lanes are narrow, like construction, or in windy weather, it engages too frequently and overcorrects,” she said. “I find myself wrestling with the steering wheel, which is unsettling.”

Pilot Assist

Pilot Assist is a semi-autonomous system that flips on at speeds slower than 33 mph. It combines the adaptive cruise control and lane keeping steering assist into one feature that not only keeps the XC90 a safe distance from the car in front of it, but steers it as well. I was stuck in traffic on the notorious Pacific Coast Highway in the afternoon and flipped the system on; I was able to looking longingly at the ocean for short stretches while the vehicle did the work.

In his time with the XC90, Hanley reported a couple interesting observations. The first being that “Pilot Assist has a problem recognizing lane markings when the sun is low on the horizon; on more than one occasion it kept turning off because it couldn’t detect any lane markings even though they were present.”

I asked Volvo’s safety engineers why this might happen; they said that the camera system is (in essence) subject to the same limitations as the human eye is. If the sun is blinding the camera, or the markers are covered by snow for example, then it will not work. Same thing for construction zones, where the lane markers are irregular. In situations where the software can’t safely interpret the environment, it will default to human control, Volvo said.

Hanley also reported that Pilot Assist had a tendency to draw the XC90 to the right side of the lane, which can be a problem if there is a large vehicle there. Andreas Carlsson, who worked on the XC90’s driver assist systems, said that “Pilot Assist also includes the position of the vehicle in front when setting its target lane position, and this may bias the resulting position to the left or to the right.” While this explains the XC90’s behavior, I am not convinced that this is a superior choice to keeping the vehicle in the center of the lane.

Blind Spot Warning

Road Test Editor Joe Bruzek noted that the blind spot warning system has an easier-to-see indictor than many other systems. The boomerang shaped light is “bright and large enough to be visible out of the corner of your eye.”

Distance Alerts

The XC90’s Distance Alerts feature had our editors split. A red light appears on the windshield if the system thinks you are following a vehicle too closely, glowing more brightly the closer you get. Bruzek was not amused. It was “too much of a nanny, and I find the glowing red on the windshield more of a distraction than anything,” he said. Hanley however, thought that the system was “a good coaching tool to help you achieve an appropriate following distance.”

City Safety

Although we haven’t (thankfully) had a chance to really test it, Volvo’s City Safety system is an important one. Volvo puts several safety technologies under the City Safety umbrella, which activates between 2 and 30 mph. The system detects when vehicles and even pedestrians and cyclists are in front of the car; if the driver does not react quickly enough, City Safety will trigger the automatic braking system to prevent a collision. It also will detect if you are turning in front of an oncoming vehicle (from either direction) and will brake to ensure you don’t move into that vehicle’s path. There is also a rear-collision warning system that will tighten the seat belts and activate the brakes to keep occupants safer if it detects a potential rear-end collision.

Overall, the XC90’s safety systems work well, but a few of them still have kinks – most notably Pilot Assist (low-sun situations) and the camera systems (dirty lenses). Despite these issues, I still consider the XC90 to have the cleanest execution of several safety technologies that I’ve experienced in other vehicles — especially Pilot Assist, which is a godsend in Los Angeles traffic.

Stay tuned to Cars.com for more about our experiences with the XC90 during the coming months, and click here for all of our long-term vehicle coverage.