Yes, yes, we were not sealed, and you heard right: it is from the premium all-terrain XC90 that Swedish developers are going to soon create a nothing but a pick-up truck. Of course, every design engineer should have a certain amount of “madness” in their projects, but here, it seems, this share has gone off scale thoroughly. Volvo XC90without going beyond the common sense, you can think of anything, but in the form of a truck sharpened for one specific task - to be a workhorse for the carriage of goods in difficult road conditions - it is too difficult. However, there is information that Volvo XC90 Soon will be a mid-size pickup. This is evidenced by photographs published on the website motor1.com. They captured the so-called experimental "mule" Volvo XC90, in whose architecture revolutionary changes have already been made.
All pickups, as a class of light trucks, solve specific problems for which they are sharpened - the carriage of goods. This involves the chassis on the frame, the presence of a rear axle beam, all-wheel drive transmission and longitudinal engine layout. There are, of course, extraordinary truck models that only work on the front wheel drive. This, for example, Honda Ridgeline and still in the state of conceptual models pickups South Korean company Hyundai, which will soon begin to be mass-produced. 
Idea with by Volvo pickup It does not seem heretical when it comes to creating a tuning project that has recently been implemented worldwide with limited and expensive “editions” with many well-known car brands. But the online publication Motor1, claims that we are not talking about tuning, we are talking about creating a full-fledged light truck. The photographs published by the portal show a prototype of a car with the already modified body of the XC90 all-terrain vehicle. What are these modifications? The first thing that catches your eye is an enlarged wheelbase, with a conventional crossover it is 2 m 98.4 cm, and here we see that the rear suspension is pushed back another twenty to twenty five centimeters. And according to this parameter, the "mule" approached closely to the Honda Ridgeline pickup with its 3m 18 cm between the axles. 
Seeing such a design change, of course, we can assume that the Swedes are preparing some kind of elongated cross for, say, Chinese-loving long cars. But this idea has to be discarded, drawing attention to the second detail of this "mule", namely, not at all light iron beams, tied to the back of the roof of the prototype. The meaning of weighting the load on the rear suspension can be only one - to check the capacity of the car after increasing its wheelbase. 
Swedish developers, having decided to create a pickup truck based on the premium crossover, probably thought so: “The Germans can, having created a truck from a Mercedes-Benz crossover, and we, the Swedes, are worse off?”. But still, if the German pickup of the X-Class on the Nissan NP300 Navara platform is a classic pick-up truck, then the Swedish future truck is nothing more than a truck for the original guys. A sort of new life-style for urban dudes, not otherwise.
By the way: at the April auto show in Shanghai, the Swedes will present the serial version of the compact cross Volvo XC40.
