The new Volvo XC90 was recently launched.

Opening my notebook now, I find the first line I wrote at the product presentation was “The Human Machine Interface”.

I look at those words with utter bafflement. What on earth can they mean? Has there ever been a more perfect specimen of car company marketing bollocks – grander in its sonority and, at the same time, emptier of meaning?

The most blameworthy aspect of this tripe is that nobody will have forced Volvo do it. They must have come up with it of their own free will. The XC90 is the first completely new car to emerge from that noble automotive house since they were freed from Ford’s ownership and taken over by Zhejiang Geely Holdings of China. Geely have piled billions of investment into Volvo and, no doubt, they will have very particular and definite ideas about how Volvo should advance commercially; but they seem to want Volvo to express themselves as Volvo – to make cars that bear that highly individual and matchless Volvo stamp.

To that end, the XC90 is the first to be developed using a new platform and powertrain that will be common to coming Volvos; and both of these crucial elements have been engineered, designed and manufactured solely by Volvo for Volvo. Instead of having to pick up components from Ford’s spare-parts bin, Volvo have had a free hand to make the XC90 the way they wanted it to be. So the words “Human Machine Interface” are as much their own creation as the new Drive-E engines in the XC90 which are all lightweight four cylinder two litre units (all with eight-speed “Geartronic” automatic transmissions).

Opening the press pack for the XC90, I am reminded that “The Human Machine Interface” is, in fact, code for the satnav/audio/information controls through the nine-inch central touchscreen which looks as if a tablet has been docked in the dashboard.  In other words, it’s the instrument that makes the mechanism work. Next time you put a key in a lock, perhaps you should think of it as the Human Machine Interface.

All marketing pish-posh aside, the new XC90 is a fine piece of work – though you can’t help but wonder if it was made with people like us uppermost in the minds of its creators. Something about that massive body and that uncompromising snout speaks to me of open prairies and Rocky Mountains. Geely may not have instructed Volvo on the name for the information system but it looks as if they might have insisted that the new XC90 should appeal, in the first place, to residents of Iowa and Colorado rather than the Yorkshire Dales where the recent launch event was held.

That’s fine: there’s something to be said for being in the position of the poor transatlantic cousins if what we get as an afterthought is a car as good as the XC90. The original seven-seater XC90, dating from 2002, was a poor man’s Range Rover, Discovery or BMW X5. This new one is right up there in the top bracket.

It certainly isn’t going to be dwarfed by any rival for physical presence. The wheelbase is longer than the outgoing model but the body’s overhangs are shorter so the combined effect is one of hulking mass. Nearly five metres long and more than one and three quarters tall, the XC90 won’t be shouldered aside by anybody at the polo field or the sailing club. On the narrow and twisty dales roads of the test route, that bulk sometimes felt unwieldy and over-bearing; but the same would be true of any Range Rover.

At the same time, nowhere is more luxurious than the interior. Where the inside of the 2002 XC90 was a dour place to be – furnished with dowdy plastics and dull leathers –  the new car radiates the modernist glint and cool confidence of a Danish furniture shop. Its leathers and woods are more like the cool Copenhagen apartment of a randy politico in Borgen than the stuffy Pall Mall gentleman’s club to which so many upper-class British marques seem to aspire.