The Volvo V90 Cross Country is a high-tech, luxury station wagon that is easy to love

Best key fob in the business! Seriously, the leather-wrapped fob looks and feels wonderful. So let's fire up this might Nordic sled and see what it can do!

... Including this little tweeter in the middle of the dashboard.

The Bowers & Wilkins audio system is sublime: in the V90, it's powered by 330 watts, with tunes piped through ten speakers ...

Sensus takes some getting used to, but once you're up to speed, it's dandy.

It doesn't go quite as far as Tesla in consolidating nearly all vehicle function in a single, large, central touchscreen. But the screen is the closest thing any other automaker has to a tablet in the dashboard, right down to a "home" button that can return the user to the base interface.

It handles Apple CarPlay and Android Auto well, and for the most part, the screen is responsive.

As with all large touchscreen-style systems, there is a distraction factor — or, more accurately, a problem of having to engage the system and the screen to, for example, raise or lower the heat, while older system provide physical knobs and switches.

Still, big screens are likely to define in-vehicle interfaces in the future, with consumers demanding them. And apart from Tesla, Volvo with Sensus is the automaker that taken the plunge — and taken on both the business opportunity and risk.

Volvo's Sensus infotainment systems is made up of a large, 9-inch touchscreen that's tablet-like. This is the only setup in the luxury space that challenges Tesla's massive central touchscreen

Senus is so good that is was our runner-up for Business Insider's 2017 Infotainment System of the Year.

Yeah! A good old-fashioned P-R-N-D shifter. The V90's transmission is a reasonably good eight-speed auto that helps the hefty wagon notch 22 mpg city/30 highway/25 combined. The 0-60 mph time is a tasty six seconds, with a 130 mph top speed,

This is weird. Volvo has placed a start-stop knob between the front seats, like ... an old Saab. I owned both Volvos and Saabs, so I appreciate the gesture toward Swedish quirkiness.

Pretty standard stuff for a modern car: digital instrument cluster, and a bevy of controls on the steering wheel to manage various displays and vehicle functions. The quality of materials, as well as the fit and finish, is superb.

The V90 is equipped with a welter of safety (Volvo!) and driver-assist features. The wagon will avoid low-speed collisions, dodge pedestrians and large animals, surrounds driver and passengers with airbags, and features a semi-self-driving system called "Pilot Assist."

We've sampled Pilot Assist in several Volvos. It's OK, combing adaptive cruise control with modest levels of autosteering. It's less compelling on balance than fancier offering from Tesla, Cadillac, and Mercedes-Benz.

Let's slip inside.

Under the hood, things get interesting. This is a relatively small, 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine. By rights, this mill shouldn't make 316 horsepower with 265 pound-feet of torque. But thanks to supercharging and turbocharging, it punches well above its specs.

A vast sunroof lets in the light, although I saw mostly overcast while I had the V90 to test out.

The seats themselves are brilliant — and feature a teeny bit of Swedish branding. The comfort of these saddles is Volvo to the core. The carmaker's seats are like rolling sofas.

Flip them back up and your passengers have A LOT of legroom.

Drop the rear seats and it's almost like a pickup truck.

Can we talk about the capacious cargo capacity? As with Volvo wagons of the past, you have crazy space back there.

The V90's towing capacity isn't titanic — just 3,500 lbs. — but that's enough to haul a small trailer. The car itself tips the scales at about 4,200 lbs.

This is cool: a trailer hitch that pivots out from the beneath the V90s rear.

Unlike SUVs, a wagon rear end can be a fairly low key. The lift-gate hatch on the V90 is in proportion to the rest of the car, lending an excellent overall sense of balance to the car.

Perhaps more distinctive are the tall tail lights. These have been a staple of Volvo's for a decade and actually present an unmistakable Volvo view when you're trailing one of the Swedish machines.

The distinctive "Thor's hammer" headlights. They're bright and effective LED units.

There's that famous Volvo badge. It's an ancient symbol for iron. Volvo's "Swedish steel" was one of the things that gave the brand a standout reputation for safety.

The more I look at this generation of Volvo front ends, the more In think they're among the coolest on the car business.

It's also pretty big. There's ample room for five people in there. The color of our tester was "Osmium Grey Metallic."

For the record, the Cross Country trim raises the ride height a few inches, providing slightly better offroad and foul-weather ground clearance.

The V90 might be the best-looking wagon Volvo has ever made. Sure, fans of the classic 240 wagons of yesteryear can disagree. But this vehicle is sharp.