By the admission of Volvo, the XC90 is a "newcomer" in the luxury SUV market, and which began in 2002 - five years after Mercedes-Benz M-Class and three years later than the BMW X5.
However, Volvo says the XC90 has become the "most valuable export product of Sweden", record sales of 85 000 points in 2005 and will bring about 6.2 billion dollars by year's flagship. The United States has been the market leader in the XC90 38 800 units sold in 2004 and 36 200 in 2005.
But nine years is a very long time in the automotive industry, and even though Volvo SUV was updated at least three times in 2007, 2009 and 2011, the competition advanced. Meanwhile, the Swedish company has changed hands when it was sold by Ford to Geely, which is currently developing XC90 replacement.
While the second generation XC90 are linked to another "backwards" as it is in the early stages of development and is not intended to hit the market until 2014.
Car & Driver, visited Volvo's Design Studio in California just before the Los Angeles Auto Show, which the Swede has little to show other than the concept prototype.
There, the magazine has a vision of four drawings that describe the various design proposals for the new XC90. One of them is a blow to, and incorporates the new "face" in advance for that concept.
The other three images are three quarters behind sketches and although they are similar, they vary considerably in many details of the shape of the tail lamps of the size and angle of the pillar C.
The people at Volvo would not comment on which of the four is the closest to the green light, but they revealed that the new XC90 is the first model of the company to use the new architecture scalable platform - possibly with the system of kinetic energy recovery currently being tested by the manufacturer.
The leaders of the Swedish company has also told the magazine that the 2014 driver line-up XC90 is composed of four cylinders (probably turbo), according to the trend driven by the regulations more stringent emission reduction.
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