Volvo Cars has revealed a special version of its award-winning V90 Cross Country all-road estate to celebrate the start of the 2017/18 Volvo Ocean Race.
Buyers of the car will also contribute directly to helping understand the health of our oceans. To support the Volvo Ocean Race’s Science Programme centred around ocean plastics, the company will donate €100 for each of the first 3000 V90 Cross Country Volvo Ocean Race cars it plans to build. The resulting total donation of €300,000 underlines Volvo Cars’ long-standing commitment to environmental care.
The Volvo Ocean Race Science Programme equips boats in this year’s race with a variety of sensors that will capture data from some of the remotest parts of the world’s oceans. This includes temperatures, barometric pressure, currents and wind speed, which will help contribute to more accurate weather forecasts and climate models used by scientists globally.
Furthermore, the boats will measure levels of salinity, dissolved CO2 and algae in the seawater around them. Combined with other data on microplastics, these measurements will help create a more complete picture of the scale of plastic pollution and its impact on ocean life. The Programme’s science partners include the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).
The car itself will help tackle the problem of marine pollution, as the carpet inlays are made from Econyl, a fabric made from 100% recycled nylon, including abandoned fishing nets reclaimed from the seabed.
The V90 Cross Country Volvo Ocean Race was developed by Volvo designers and a group of engineers within the company’s Special Vehicles department, a purpose-built facility at Volvo Cars’ base in Torslanda, Sweden. 
Read our local and overseas reviews of the Volvo V90 Cross Country.
Watch our short video report on the V90 Cross Country T5 2.0 in Singapore.
