[Chris Parish]

I have been driving many different cars for 40yrs and it never ceases to amaze me how when you actually drive a car it seems to be completely different from the road test reports and the apparent performance bears no resemblance to the quoted figures.

My S80 D5 is supposed to be much slower in acceleration that my wife's S60 2.0 T. What the bare figures don't tell you is that the S80 will romp off very quickly without any fuss or driver expertise due to its low down torque. The S60 needs to be thrashed to get the (much faster) acceleration figures, but during normal driving actually feels slower.