Congratulations on your choice, in a hard to find -and beautiful- color.

I struggled with a choice between the WRX and the S60 and based my decision substantially on the feedback from other forum members in this thread Subaru WRX vs. Volvo S60 V60 XC60 . I loved driving the WRX driving experience, but to me there was nowhere near the refinement, fit, finish, structural integrity, and content that you find in the S60. The main draw of WRX to me was the manual; pity that Volvo didn't offer a stick in the current generation S60 like they did in the previous R. But on the other hand, traffic in my area to a large degree negates the advantages of the manual. Otherwise IMHO the cars are in a different league, and to me the S60 T6 and R-Design are a logical progression from the WRX. I have thoroughly enjoyed my 2012 S60 R-Design, and the fact that you came to the S60 from the WRX only confirms the decision between the two.

I can highly recommend the Polestar upgrade. When you shift into the sport mode with Polestar tuning, the car comes alive and almost seem like a different car, for those occasions where you have opportunity or mood to enjoy the increased performance. Deceptively quick, indeed.

I would also highly recommend you get the IPD sway bar. I have them on my XC60, S80, and S60. In all three cases the handling improved with no negatives in ride. In the S60, the handling becomes remarkably neutral in all but the most extreme limits, and its neutral balance belies the car's FWD roots.

I look forward to reading about your mods. You'll find the community here very helpful, constructively positive as a whole, and often entertaining.

Again, congratulations on your choice.

 

The main draw of WRX to me was the manual; pity that Volvo didn't offer a stick in the current generation S60 like they did in the previous R. But on the other hand, traffic in my area to a large degree negates the advantages of the manual.

I hear you on that one. Although the other day my own car was in the shop for routine maintenance, and the loaner they gave me was a 2017 V60 with BLIS, adaptive cruise control, road sign information, lane keeping and all the other stuff that goes along with it. The adaptive cruise control itself was kind of nice in moderate traffic - I could just set it and the car would speed up/slow down as needed with no intervention. I think my next car will probably have it .

 

Very Nice
Enjoy!!

 

love the color and welcome to the forum.

 

Very nice and even better pics. Congrats and welcome aboard!

 

+1 (Love my S60.......)

 

Congrats.. I too was a big NASIOC fan and ran through three Subarus... Tribeca, Impreza Outback Sport and 3.6R Legacy. You'll learn a lot here about your P3.

 

Congrats, and welcome! You'll probably find it's a little harder to get some of the easy access to info you've come to expect from a bigger forum community on a car that has been more fully developed by its fans, because only a handful of people have really dug into these things and there's a comparatively limited pool of knowledge to draw from, not to mention less traffic on these subforums by far. Nevertheless it's a helpful and friendly crew, and the more active and enthusiastic contributors we get, the better this forum becomes! Can't wait to see your car come along and have you contribute to our discussions!

 

Thanks! Look at some of your signature lists for all the cars you all have, I'm envious!

I wanted to keep the WRX, honestly. However, we live on a city street and it's bad enough with the cars on the block now for parking, so taking up three spots with my Volvo, the Outback, and a WRX would be asking for a neighbor revolt.

I'm curious about the IPD sway bar, but the roads up here in the Philly metro region are terrible. I had a stiff setup in the WRX with a 25mm/22mm front/rear sway and upgraded endlinks and every highway gap or hole was met with a big "thunk". I'll have to give it some thought.

First "mod" already coming in a few days... I had a full retrofit in the WRX that I put together, STi projectors, TSX-R clear lenses, a custom curved cutoff shield, Matsu****a Gen V ballasts, and OSRAM CBI D2S bulbs. The S60 lamps are no where near as wide and sharp as the retrofit, but I have on order a set of OSRAM D3S CBI's and have raised up the headlamp height (thanks again for the tip, I would have not noticed the 6 mm set screw underneath the front cover if i hadn't searched for it here).

Synesis, thanks for all the links in your signature. Pouring over them now.

More pictures! I can't get enough of this car.

Here's one of my WRX a week prior to trading it in. I bought it a few months out of grad school; it was my first brand new vehicle. I had a solid 7.5 years of fun with it.

 

The S60 lamps are no where near as wide and sharp as the retrofit, but I have on order a set of OSRAM D3S CBI's and have raised up the headlamp height (thanks again for the tip, I would have not noticed the 6 mm set screw underneath the front cover if i hadn't searched for it here).

Interested in your thoughts on your HID replacement vs. stock.. I'm still running OEM 2011 stock bulbs and find them a tad "yellow". Also I've never felt a need to raise the height since the lamps are self leveling. Does it make the light spread that much better?

 

p.rico: Great post on the bulbs. I added a link to your post in the Aiming Headlights section of the Sojourn thread in my sig. Thanks for sharing this.

 

I have a simple but effective way of aligning the head lights...

Find a building at night with a level parking lot and a blank wall, and park about 20-30 feet away from the wall, shining the headlights on the wall.
Take a yard stick (or tape measure) and measure right in front the bumper the distance from the ground to the cutoff of the headlight beam (shining the beam on the flat face of the yardstick).
Walk to the wall and measure from the ground to the cutoff there.
The distance should be the same at most, a bit lower is better, so that the beam doesn't shine in the eyes of oncoming traffic if you are going over slight rise in the road.

Adjust the cutoff height using the info in these links.

Adjusting Xenon Headlights
Adjusting Headlights

I find this gets me maximum illumination of the road in front of the car, and I have never had anyone flash at me for the lights being aimed too high.

 

My favorite colour on the S60! Quite jealous! But congrats!


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Like that copper! Congrats!

 

congrats! welcome to the family

 

Synesis: glad to help! Hopefully I'll be able to contribute more along the way.

Coming from having owned all manuals in all my cars, I'm still not really used to, or have gotten the feel for the geartronic. It seems a bit foreign to me. I think it's the fact that you have to go through all the gears quickly to get to the gear you want to be in (instead of just going from one gate to the one you want in manual) and because I don't really have a sense of the correct speeds in each gear, much less an understanding of what gear the car is in to begin with to know what gear to go to. Maybe it will get better eventually.

I will say though, I love putting it in gate for sport mode and going at it. I did a 0-60 mph run this morning with my Dashcommand app and my OBDLink and in one try got a 5.8 sec run, which pretty much matches what the magazine rags got. It's too easy. The WRX was of course quicker...I was able to hit 4.9-5.0 sec in my WRX in best cases...but then again I ended up usually in the low to mid 5's due to the WRX transmission bogging during launch. The center differential hated the hard launches, so it was always a pain having to finagle the clutch to get a good time without shocking the drivetrain (and you always ended up with the burnt clutch smell no matter how well you did).

Also got to drive in pouring rain here today, and am quite satisfied with the stability of the car's AWD system.

 

Wow. Every time I look at this car in that copper color it gets more beautiful.

 

I know the feeling! There are a few things I wish I could have gotten with the car (the sleipner wheels, rear spoiler) like with others I was shopping, but the color sealed it. Even enough over a comparable R-Design!

 

Received my set of OSRAM CBI's last night and quickly got them in.

Observations... my left headlamp assembly is older than my right one (which seems nearly new)... hmm. The things you find out about your pre-owned cars when you start taking them apart.

These things are kickass. I'd recommend them to anyone with the stock aging bulbs, especially if you run the DRL through the D3S all day. I'm going to probably get the IPD DRL kit for the front to eliminate the need to run the DRL on the HID bulb.

 

Also, for comparison, here's images of the housing with the stock OSRAM 66340 D3S bulb (4150K) on top and the OSRAM 66340 CBI D3S bulb (5500-6000K) on the bottom. Color is a cleaner white, and the intensity of the new bulb is tremendous (they're about 3400 lm, which is slightly higher than the standard 3200 lm of typical bulbs).

 

^^Easy to swap bulbs or did you have to pull the entire headlamp out?

 

The process for this car is pretty easy actually. I love that you can pull the whole lamp out with two pull tabs! On my WRX, the whole headlamp is screwed into the body with 6 or so screws. To do anything that required pulling the headlamp, you had to take the friggin' bumper and grill off!

Seriously, its so simple. Find the two pull tabs on the top of the headlamp. There's one on the top corner of the headlamp:

And one on the bottom corner of the headlamp:

Once you pull those, the only thing keeping the light in is the wiring harness. Undo the harness.

After that, carefully pull the headlamp out.

Once you have the headlamp, sit somewhere and grab a Torx 20 driver and pull the four screws of the dust cover off the headlamp.

Now, you've exposed the inner assembly and the bulbs. On the D3S projector, there is a black collar just ahead of the bulb that has two tabs. Grab the collar and turn it about an 1/8 turn to unlock the collar and the fingers holding the bulb in place.

Once you've turned the collar, you can pull on the D3S igniter and get the bulb out of the fingers.

Unclip the bulb, replace the bulb and go back in order the way you got here. Make sure to not forget to turn the collar back to the starting position when you sit the bulb back in the projector. That is to lock it in place.

In all it should take you all of 10-15 minutes in total.

 

Thanks and awesome tutorial with your pics. Isn't the way the headlamps remove very "Ford"?

 

I had some free time today (day off), so I decided to finally get to tuning the audio a bit.

Again, there were two things about this S60 that pale in comparison to my WRX: the headlamps (after I retrofitted them), and the audio system (after I installed components, wiring, dynamat, underseat subwoofer, Clarion EQ in center console, and 10" ported subwoofer). The moral of the story is here that I had a crappy platform to start with in the WRX and did a lot of labor to make them right. For this vehicle, the starting point isn't bad, it's just not to that level.

I think the premium sound in the S60 is a pretty good unit. I love the 3 way setup up front in the doors, the center channel, and the ability to set the front stage as prominent. The only thing this car is really missing is a good subwoofer. I am going to have to figure out how to get one in here (probably a hi-level harness to branch off the signal to a subwoofer/amp or pre-amped subwoofer box.

My RTA is my cell phone running AudioTools and a Dayton Audio iMM‑6 microphone. The nice thing Dayton does is provide a calibration curve off the website for your individual microphone that you can upload to AudioTools. That way you can ensure that the microphone is capturing everything in calibration.

To start, I:

Set all EQ settings to flat.
Turned off Surround.
Set the sound stage to Front Speakers.

After setting the default here was the frequency response:

Heavy, heavy, heavy lows... I knew this past week that it was very heavy weighted so I had by ear set the Bass in the simple EQ in the sound menu down 4 or 5 notches to compensate.

Having only 5 EQ bands that were adjustable is pretty limiting, however I think I got it to a point of it being particularly leveled out.

Here's the settings I've settled on for now. I'm probably going to fine tune it on the road a bit, but as it is, it is very balanced, and no distortion or peaky areas to be concerned with.

I took the readings from center as I was setting it with the front speaker stage, but even in driver's seat the sound is still well balanced.

From center:

From driver's seat:

I tried setting the sound stage to Driver but it heavily weighs the sound to the left door, instead of doing what it should be doing which is time alignment, so I turned it back to front stage.

I turned on Surround again and it is balanced enough and provides a bit of a coloring to give some bass back. I set the Dolby setting to standard setting. Setting it above that gives some weird stage issues... I prefer a front stage that doesn't conflict with rear driven sounds (I didn't even run rear speakers in the WRX).

I'll have to do some research to see what I can do about a subwoofer... but overall happy with where the car is at least for now.

 

I'll have to do some research to see what I can do about a subwoofer... but overall happy with where the car is at least for now.

Check out the Audio Settings and Upgrades section this post . There are two threads about adding subwoofers, and info in the Sojourn thread about upgrade paths. Most of the settings you have arrived at bear out mark-sf's settings and what he found about the factory EQ on the XC60. That Dayton mic and app is really affordable and handy. I look forward to reading about your progress.

 

p.rico

Thanks for the step-by-step with pics on changing the bulbs.

I added it to the headlight section of the S60 Sojourn - S60 R-Design Information, Reference, and Build Thread for reference.

 

Installed some knockoff R-Design pedal covers today. Look pretty authentic to even the closest inspection.

 

Amazon "New Moon" brand?

 

Got in my OEM rear spoiler. It was painted by Volvo in 12/2012 and has been sitting in this box ever since. You would think they would charge less for them by now...

Didn't realize I had needed extra supplies (urethane and primer)... oh Volvo. Of course I tried to contact my local dealer to get them and they say they're discontinued. I purchased a tube of autoglass urethane as substitute and am awaiting the tube for install.

 

I scraped it up a bit myself as well on the bottom lip from the ballast... to fix it I ordered the volvo touch up paint and clear coat pens. I'll probably tackle that when it gets a bit cooler.

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Finally got to doing the rear spoiler today. Gave the surface a good prep, put on the urethane, and on the car. Super stiff immediately and an hour later... no issues. I was afraid of the look ruining the lines, but I spent hours on the web looking at R-Designs and it sold me. Pleased with how it gives a bit more "weight" on the rear design language.

 

Looks good! Do you plan to do anything else to the exterior?

 

Which part of DE? I got my T5 through OSD and have the "baseball glove" leather interior. I work in Wilmington.