On the road: Volvo V60 Cross Country car review – ‘The kind of car in which you’d be happy to see your baby driven’

A fabled trait of the Volvo is safety, and this has all you'd expect

Cars, in their brand building, love to ethnicise their qualities, so that long before you can drive, you know that a BMW is built with German rigour, a Saab would win in a traditional collision with an elk, and a Volvo has heated seats. In the 90s, that was bizarre and exotic, like having a Jacuzzi in Guildford. Now that it has competition from other marques (Audi), the Volvo has made its seats hotter and more leathery. There's a temperature beyond which your cells coagulate and cannot go back, like scrambled egg, and my butt has never felt closer to it. The windscreen is also heated and - this is a life first - so are the washer nozzles.

The other fabled trait of the Volvo is safety, and the V60 Cross Country has all you'd expect, airbags lurking like tumours in every pocket of its skeleton, collision warning with auto-brake that I was never quite bold enough to put to the test, along with more baroque security features - skid plates, for those moments when you throw yourself over mountains and scrape your bodywork against the rocks (of your imagination). The high-spec cabin is crammed with bling, screens that give strange information, such as how many people are in the back (I guess this is handy if you habitually forget one of your children).