My time with the Volvo EX30 has been like a romantic comedy – here’s why

This is my Volvo EX30, and my relationship with this car over the past six months has been a bit like something out of a 2000s rom-com. You know the ones – a handsome newcomer arrives in town, but the protagonist spends the first few weeks pretending they’re not interested because “ugh, they’re so annoying”.

But eventually, charm and character wins out and the two fall in love and live happily ever after. Sadly, that last part won’t happen for me and my EX30, because Volvo wants its car back in a few weeks. I’ll be sad to see it go, even if it did irritate the daylights out of me at times.

Six months with a Volvo EX30 – things I loved

I’m going to start with the positives, because I’ve really grown to like the EX30 over the last six months.

1. The styling

I think the thing I love most about the EX30 is the way it looks, because it stands out against the sea of bland SUVs out there right now. I’ve actually had two different cars over the last six months, one black and one light grey, and I reckon the latter looks the best.

The lighter colour highlights the little details better, such as the wraparound rear lights and the vents on the bumper. The LED lights look fabulous, and I like the welcome animation you get when you walk up to the car as well.

2. The interior

The interior looks just as great as the exterior. I had the “Pine” upholstery in my first EX30, which is posh speak for light green, and it really lifts the cabin. The woven plastic finish on the dashboard is a cool touch, as are the solid metal door handles.

I also like the clever cup holder solution. They pop out from the centre console, and you can choose between having one cupholder and a storage area, two cupholders or just opening the space up for putting stuff in.

3. It’s lovely to drive

I cover a lot of miles in this car, and it’s been a really comfortable motorway cruiser. You get very little road or wind noise, and the suspension is smooth at speed as well. It can get a little bit jittery around town, but on the whole it’s really comfy.

This is also helped by the excellent seats, which are just supportive enough to stop you rolling around but are also nice and soft.

4. It has a great sound system

The EX30 has a Harman Kardon sound system, and it’s really good. The bass is strong and you get clear, crisp audio. It’s great for everything from blasting My Chemical Romance to listening to true crime podcasts.

Plenty of cars have a good stereo, but what makes the Volvo’s stand out is the fact there are no speakers in the front doors. It just has a sound bar which runs along the base of the windscreen, which makes it all the more impressive.

5. The Volvo app is really handy

One of the things I love about electric cars is the ability to activate functions remotely, and the EX30’s app has come in really useful a few times. Being able to set the climate control to come on before I set off in the morning has been a life saver as the temperature starts to plummet.

You can also sound the horn and flash the lights to find your car in a car park, something I’ve used a few times when I’ve come out of Heathrow airport and forgotten where I left the car.

Six months with a Volvo EX30 – things I didn’t like

I have grown to love my EX30, despite these pretty annoying features.

1. The key fob

It took about half a day with this car to realise that having a key fob with no buttons on it is a stupid idea. In theory you’re meant to just walk up to the car with the key on you, it opens up and you climb aboard. In reality though, this only works properly about 70% of the time.

We had similar problems with our Peugeot 5008 long-termer, but that car at least had an unlock button on the key as a backup. The EX30 has no buttons, nor does it have an emergency key blade. I would either have to dig my phone out to load up the app and unlock the car, or just walk around the car aimlessly until it woke up.

2. The touchscreen

I’m used to driving cars which rely on a touchscreen, and while I do prefer to have physical buttons I can get to grips with a screen-based setup as long as it’s intuitive. However, the Volvo’s system needs work.

A lot of the icons are quite small and fiddly to jab on the move, and I’m still at odds to work out why the climate control functions are spread between two different menus. It just requires a bit too much thought to operate the things which you use the most.

3. The driver attention alert

The Volvo’s driver monitoring system is among the more nagging of the ones I’ve experienced. I’m allowed three yawns before it pipes up and tells me to take a break, which is usually by the time I reach the end of my road. If I took a break every time it advised me to, I’d never get anywhere.

I was driving back from Heathrow airport a few weeks back when the sat nav tried to redirect me to a charging point I didn’t need to stop at, and when I prodded the tiny cross button to cancel it the car had the gall to beep and tell me to “focus on driving”. Thankfully this system is easy to turn off with two button presses.

4. The steering wheel buttons

The steering wheel controls are among the only buttons in the car, and even those are quite annoying to use. They’re basically all one button behind a touch sensitive panel which detects where you’re pushing it.

The buttons are pretty unresponsive to your inputs, and turning the volume down is especially annoying because you can’t do it quickly. You quickly tap the button and it slowly comes down, and if you hold the button it’ll mute the stereo.

5. It’s not very practical

If you grew up in the 00s like I did, you probably know Volvo as a maker of hugely spacious family cars. I was therefore quite surprised to find out that the EX30 isn’t actually very practical.

The rear seats are really cramped, as I found out when my parents visited me and I tried to get them in the back. The boot also isn’t massive, and the front boot is just a fraction too small to fit the charging cables, rendering it pretty much useless. As a single person living alone, it’s still been perfect for my daily needs, but if you need to get kids in the back then look elsewhere.

My time with the EX30 is coming to an end. Having got off to a rocky start with this car’s tech, I’ve been swooned over the last six months by its handsome styling and comfy driving experience. Be sure to check out my final verdict.

Report 3 August 2025: warming to my Volvo EX30

The major gripe I had with this car was the infotainment system. Everything in this car is controlled through the touchscreen, and it’s fiddly and difficult to use on the move. I’ve detailed the main issues with this screen in my interior report below, but after a couple of months I finally learned my way around it.

And now that I can control most of the car’s basic function without having to stop, I’ve finally started to gel with the little Volvo. I always loved the way it looks, both inside and out, and it’s also lovely to drive.

Around town its dinky dimensions and raised driving position make it really easy to slot through gaps in traffic and into tight parking spaces. It also deals with the rubbish roads of Hampshire amicably – although it does jiggle about a bit over broken surfaces.

Out on the motorway everything smooths out nicely, and the EX30 is also nice and quiet at speed. One small fly in the ointment is the auto steer feature, which is meant to keep you neatly between the white lines but actually bounces you between them like a bowling ball when you put the gutter guards up.

It’s easy to turn this off though from one button on the steering wheel, then it just does a good job of keeping you a safe distance from the car in front. Another feature which is easy to switch off is the lane-keeping assist, which I’m grateful for.

That’s because on a country road it can be a bit sensitive, and it tugs at the wheel quite aggressively as well. With that turned off it’s much more relaxing to drive, although it is in no way sporty.

It’ll go where you point it, and there’s minimal body roll through the bends, but there’s not much feedback through the wheel and it’s not particularly engaging. This is not a problem in a car like this, it’s just a comfy SUV, but I am slightly perplexed as to why this version needs 430hp.

It is ballistically fast in a straight line, with 0-60mph taking just 3.6 seconds. But as soon as you hit a corner you realise that the suspension simply isn’t up to the job of going around it at any any sort of speed, leading you to drive it in a more relaxed fashion.

I do enjoy having this power when overtaking or trying to join a dual carriageway on a short slip road, but 99% of the time it’s pretty pointless.

Still, despite this ballistic turn of speed the Volvo is proving to be pretty efficient. Over the last few months I’ve averaged 3.0 miles per kWh (which I had to convert from kWh per 100 miles because this is the only readout you get – Volvo, please fix this), and that equates to a real-world range of just over 207 miles. That’s some way off the 279-mile claimed figure, but still not bad for something as powerful as this.

Despite my shaky start with the Volvo EX30’s infotainment system, after three months with it I am really warming to this car. It looks great, it’s nice to drive and it has plenty of character. With just a software update to make that screen easier to use, this would be my ideal electric SUV.

Living with a Volvo EX30 report 2 June 2025: interior and practicality

This is my Volvo EX30, a small electric SUV which I’ll be living with for around six months to see how it copes with daily driving duties. I’ve had just over a month to get to grips with this car, and on the whole it’s a really likeable little thing.

I love the way it looks, it always garners a look back after parking up, and the interior spec also looks wicked. This car has the “Pine” interior package, meaning it has light green upholstery which really lifts the cabin, and the recycled material on the dashboard and door cards looks great as well.

There are also some subtle details which amp up the premium feeling inside, such as the solid metal door handles and chunky steering column stalks. Everything you touch frequently feels high quality – things only get cheap and scratchy lower down. I can forgive this though because the EX30 is pretty affordable for such a desirable car.

So the interior looks way cooler than alternatives like the Ford Puma Gen-E or Kia EV3, but it’s not the most practical. Rear legroom is really tight, as my family found out when they came to visit and I put the Volvo into service as a taxi, and the boot isn’t massive either.

This doesn’t really bother me personally as it’s rare that I need to carry four people, however there is something which irks me a lot more than the lack of cabin space, and that’s the infotainment system.

Everything in this car is controlled through the touchscreen, and I mean everything – even opening the glovebox. I’m not going to jump on the motoring journalist bandwagon of moaning about mirror controls routed through the screen though – I set this once and haven’t touched them again.

The infotainment system itself is based on Google software and, while you do get Apple CarPlay, Android users like myself have to use the car’s native system – and it’s just not as good as using Android Auto.

You can’t split the screen between Google Maps and Spotify, although you do get shortcuts to pause and skip tracks, and it doesn’t always carry your music over from your phone like Android Auto would. Outside of media control, changing things like the following distance for the adaptive cruise control requires you to go through four different menus.

The climate control is also split across two different menus for some reason – one for fan speed and direction and one for temperature and heated seats. You also have two options for controlling the volume – a fiddly touchscreen slider or the infuriatingly unresponsive steering wheel buttons.

It’s just not intuitive enough for a system you rely on so heavily for everything, and it’s even more irritating when the driver attention warning yells at you if you look at the screen for too long.

But now I can move onto a couple of positives. It’s really easy to turn the irritating beeps and bongs off – it’s just two button presses. I’ve also programmed a button on the steering wheel to turn off the speed limit warning – which is the most intrusive system because it seems to keep getting the speed limit wrong.

I’ve also managed to circumnavigate a lot of these annoying menus using the brilliant voice controls. It’s based on Google Assistant, so you can talk to it in a natural tone of voice to do things like setting the temperature or playing a certain song on Spotify.

Volvo is rolling out an over-the-air update soon which will include some new shortcuts which are meant to make the system easier to use, and I’ll be sure to report back once my car has received the new software.

The EX30 is a really likeable car with loads of character. It looks great and I like the interior materials, but the software takes the shine off this otherwise excellent little car. Check back soon for a look at how it drives.

Living with a Volvo EX30 report 1: introduction

This is my new Volvo EX30. For the past few months I had been running our Volkswagen ID7 GTX, but after some eyelash fluttering from reviews editor Darren Cassey I surrendered the keys to the cavernous VW so he could use it to ferry his family around.

I was sad to see the ID7 go, but in fairness I don’t really have use for such an enormous car as a single man living alone – it’s much better deployed chauffeuring Darren’s three-year old and all the gear which goes with child rearing (I hear there’s quite a lot).

So, back to my new Volvo. The EX30 was actually crowned Carwow’s Car Of The Year back in 2024 thanks to its sleek Scandinavian styling, affordable price tag and funky interior. The day my new car was dropped off, I was immediately reminded just how cool it looks.

This car is finished in Onyx Black. We picked this colour because most EX30s you see are light blue or bright yellow – the black seemed like something a bit different, and I do quite like it. It gives the EX30 a Storm Trooper vibe, however I do think it suits lighter colours slightly better – they show off the more intricate details of this design.

The cabin is also quite cool. We’ve gone for the Pine interior, which means you get green seats and door card inserts. The dashboard trim is also a funky-looking woven material – it looks a bit like a jute tote bag.

We’ve sprung for the top-spec Ultra version of the EX30, meaning we get things like a panoramic glass roof, a 360-degree camera, Harman Kardon sound system and Pilot Assist – a more advanced adaptive cruise control system which can steer to keep you in lane.

Powering this car we have two electric motors which make a whopping 430hp. The first time I drove this car I was taken aback by just how fast it is, but it’ll be interesting to see what this performance does to the range.

The EX30 has a 69kWh battery, and this Twin Motor Performance version should be able to do 280 miles on a charge. I’ll be keeping a close eye on the real-world range to see how close it gets.

There are no optional extras fitted to this car. The black paint and green interior are no-cost options, so in total this top-spec EX30 costs £44,860. That makes it slightly more than a range-topping Kia EV3, however that car doesn’t have 430hp.

On first impressions, I think I’ll get on with the EX30 quite well. It did take a couple of days to get my head around the infotainment system – it’s not the most intuitive setup and everything in the car is controlled through it.

Other than that though, it’s comfy to drive, stupidly fast and I love the way it looks. Keep an eye out over the next few months for updates on what this car is like to live with.

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*Prices correct at the time of writing