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      05-18-2017, 12:11 PM   #79
LowerEast
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Drives: .
Join Date: Jan 2014
Location: NYC

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I had the same buying parameters coming out of my X5

I considered:

Escalade - drove like a truck, which I guess it is, but the handling was so bad compared to my X5 that I couldn't even consider it.

GLS - See Escalade. Not nearly as bad as the Cadillac, but the whole driving experience just felt soft and mushy to me. Nice interior, but beginning to feel dated.

Q7 - Nice car. Could happily have bought this. Runner up.

XC90 - Winner.

Beautiful interior, good third row seat room and a huge trunk. Decent handling with air suspension, adjustable dampers and 20" rims, but a step down from my M Sport X5 with adaptive suspension.

I got the Polestar upgrade to get the XC90 to about 330hp / 330 lb/ft, and it is powerful enough for what I need given that this is my family car (accelerating into gaps in traffic, overtaking etc), but it's not as nice or smooth as the straight 6 that was in my bimmer.

The semi-autonomous driving, active driving assistance, active safety features, and general technology in the Volvo are a generation or two ahead of the X5. It's night and day better in terms of the features. That said, BMW's iDrive is a significantly better and more intuitive interface than Volvo's Sensus, which I guess is to be expected given the amount of development time each has had.

The Volvo is much better value also. I got a Momentum T6 with every option other than the upgraded stereo - $68K sticker, $62K sale price. A similar spec x35i was coming in at $6 to $7K more, and even then the Volvo had a huge feature advantage over the BMW because it hasmany features you can't even get in an X5. With BMW's change in leasing philosophy, the Volvo also had better residual and money factor when I picked up mine in March.

In many respects, the Volvo XC90 is a compromise for me. If I could have bought a slightly bigger X5 with a usable third row, a bigger trunk, and the more up to date technology from the new 5 and 7 series cars, I probably would have stuck with BMW. Whether it's the X7 or X5, hopefully whatever BMW is offering in 3 years when my lease is up will be a better fit for my family than what they have available today, and I can get back into a BMW.
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