Any automaker that wants to play with the big names in the premium car league needs a performance lineup.

Just think about it; even Cadillac, which for the most part of its history was associated with luxury and cars that resembled…land yachts caved in and created the V-Series once its parent company GM got serious about competing against the Germans.

In all fairness, Volvo gave it a try much earlier with the 249hp 850 T-5R in the mid-1990s followed by the 296hp S60 R in the early 2000s before officials pulled the plug on the ‘R’ designation (not to be confused with the R-Line accessories and trim levels) in 2007.

A lot has changed since then with Ford having sold the Swedish carmaker to China’s Geely, but Volvo remains without a performance model in its range.

Recently, however, Volvo joined forces with its motorsports and tuning partner Polestar, to create a one-off, high-performance version of the S60 sedan.

The S60 Polestar Performance prototype, which gathered a lot of attention from readers and the media alike, sports a heavily modified version of Volvo’s 3.0-liter turbocharged inline-six engine boosted to 508-horsepower and 575Nm (424 lb-ft), channeled to all four wheels with the help of a six-speed manual gearbox.

Polestar gives a 0 to 100km/h (62mph) acceleration time of 3.9 seconds and a top speed in excess of 300km/h (186+mph).

The car features many more upgrades including but not limited to, the Öhlins suspension, the beefy 6-piston caliper Brembo brakes and the 19-inch wheels wrapped in 265/30 tires.

While Polestar and Volvo contemplate the possibility of a series production model, the one-off prototype was sold to an unnamed American collector for $300,000 (€242,000 at the current exchange rates), but not before the Swedes gave the car to select journalists for a ride.

One of the very few individuals that had the opportunity to sit behind the wheel of the Volvo S60 Polestar Performance was Hans Hedberg from the Swedish publication Teknikens Varld, who shared a video from the test drive.

Sure, the video is in Swedish, but you don’t have to come from the land of the midnight sun to understand the language of the journalist’s facial expressions and how he feels about the S60 by Polestar…

Still, if any of our readers from Sweden would like to sum up Hans Hedberg’s thoughts about the car in the comments section, this would be something we would surely appreciate.

Thanks to David H. for the heads up!

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