Liv's Beehive

I recently posted the following:

We need to introduce legislation that says car reviewers have to spend at least a month using the car as their only vehicle before writing the review

It was written out of frustration that car reviewers tend to write their reviews after having press access to a car for a couple of hours, and so they can never tell you what it's like to use day to day.

Similarly, a 30 minute test drive with a salesperson in the passenger seat is not a good representation of driving your own car in your own real life circumstances.

The volvo EX30 was reviewed extremely positively and received multiple "car of the year" awards. Thanks to those reviews and a tempting finance offer, I test drove one and then ordered it.

I received the keys on 28th June 2024, exactly one year ago. This post serves as my normal-person review after actually owning the car and driving it for an entire year, not just an afternoon. The car has done 8300 miles, around a lot of the UK and even in france a few times.

This review is going to focus on the technology and controls that you have to interact with on a daily basis when driving. The car is comfortable to sit in and drive, but I don't really have any more opinions than that — I'm not a car enthusiast who cares about how light the steering feels or whether the suspension is soft enough, I just want to drive my car around to get from A to B.

To be entirely upfront, this is not a positive review. Spoiler alert: I really don't recommend buying one of these cars. There are a handful of things I do like about the EX30, so I'll get those out the way first before going on to vent my frustrations.

The good parts

Here are the handful of things I actually enjoy about this car that contributed to my buying one and prevent me from hating absolutely everything about it.

Hello yellow

I ordered the "moss yellow" colour for my EX30, and this colour was the one they were using as the marketing colour. Seeing it when driving past the dealership is what caught my eye and made me start researching the car in the first place.

Sadly, like most car manufacturers, volvo has since decided that yellow is far too exciting for a car and has discontinued the moss yellow option in the UK. All the options are now either various shades of grey, or an extremely desaturated blue (which probably looks grey in real life).

Co-pilot standing by

One of the driving aids available in the car is called "pilot assist", which is not intended to be a self-driving mode (if such a thing were even possible). It's essentially adaptive cruise control with advanced lane keeping.

When you set a cruise control speed, it'll maintain that speed while adjusting to the speed of the car in front, which is great for in traffic. It'll also automatically steer to keep you centred in your lane, by using cameras to detect the road markings.

I really like using this feature on the motorway, where I tend to stay at a constant speed in one lane for a long time.

There's a subtle but nice feature where it will move over in the lane slighly when passing a large vehicle like a lorry, which makes me feel a little safer.

There is also an automatic lane change feature where it will detect appropriate gaps and automatically steer to change lanes, but I don't use that, partly because you have to turn it on every time you get in the car and partly because it's slower than changing lanes myself.

Going the distance

One of the main things that attracted me towards this car is the range. According to the official figures, this "extended range" model with a 69 kWh battery gets a range of up to 295 miles.

That figure is absolute nonsense, but that's because the official figure is nonsense for all EVs. I would love to know what they do to calculate those figures. In real world use, I've seen this car go anywhere from 220 to 250 miles on a charge.

My previous car was a renault zoe with a 52 kWh battery and a claimed range of 239 miles, and I never got more than about 180 miles out of it on a charge. The EX30 was a big upgrade in this regard.

Having the ability to use 150 kW DC rapid charging helps a lot too — on a long trip, charging for 15 minutes is usually plenty to get back up to around 80% and continue onwards.

Better-than-okay google

My other favourite feature of this car is the google maps integration in the infotainment system. The whole system runs on android automotive (which is not the same thing as android auto!) so everything is google-ified, including the built-in navigation. This means you get a version of google maps that knows information about your car, like its current battery level.

When you plan a route, it takes the battery level into account and automatically schedules charging stops if necessary, including showing how long to charge at each stop. It'll also provide an estimate for how much battery would be left after a return journey.

I find that the estimates are quite accurate, and lean a little pessimistic but not overly so. On longer trips, I will often arrive with around 5% more battery than it expected, perhaps because I try to drive quite economically anyway.

There are apps like ABRP which can plan an EV-specific navigation route, but only the built-in google maps can directly read your car's current state — without jumping through some hoops, ABRP requires that you manually tell it your starting battery level and it'll basically guess when you need to charge.

Of course, this feature is not exclusive to the EX30, since plenty of other cars use android automotive. But it's still a really useful feature.

He's behiiiind youuuu

I'm going to be talking a fair amount about driving aids and warning systems later on, but here's one that seems to work pretty flawlessly and I find incredibly helpful: the rear cross traffic alert, or RCTA system. If the car is in reverse and a vehicle or pedestrian is crossing behind the car, you'll hear an alert and see a message on the screen. This is great when mavouvering in car parks and someone walks behind your car.

There's also a system that warns you of traffic approaching from behind when you're parked, to prevent you opening the door into an incoming vehicle. Another useful feature, although it's less reliable than the RCTA system. In the past it has told me not to open my door because it saw a bush swaying in the wind.

The frustrating parts

I specifically use the word frustrating because this just my own opinion and I can't make a blanket statement that these things are outright bad.

Tesla-fication

The EX30 has no driver display behind the steering wheel. Instead, there's a 12-inch touchscreen mounted vertically in the centre of the dashboard, like an iPad. This is famously one of the "features" of tesla cars, moving all the important information away from being directly in front of the driver.

I can only assume that someone who works for volvo saw a tesla and said "that's cool, let's do that". I cannot think of any reason to move critical safety information (like your vehicle's speed and warnings about the status of the car) out of the direct view of the driver.

Actually there is one potential reason: not having a second screen behind the steering wheel makes the car marginally cheaper to manufacture. But the EX30 isn't an overly cheap car — the price of mine came close to putting me over the threshold for paying the UK's expensive car supplement.

No matter the reason, this change is strictly worse than having a proper driver display like almost every other car (even the smart #1, which shares a platform with the EX30, has a driver display). Instead of a quick glance down at the top of the steering wheel, checking your speed or reading a warning message requires moving your head to the left. Warning messages are positioned on the left side of the area, which is even further to look.

I actually believe that this car was originally intended to have a display behind the steering wheel. The top section of the touchscreen, where this information is shown, isn't touch sensitive and is even proportioned like the driver display in the smart #1. It also doesn't run in the same software stack as the rest of the display. And messages being on the left side really suggests to me that it was meant to be positioned directly in front of you. (The layout is mirrored on left hand drive cars, so it's not because of the UK model being right hand drive.)

You'll also notice that the touchscreen takes the place of where any physical controls might live in the middle of the dashboard. All the controls for the air conditioning, heated seats, and even the hazard lights are all part of the touchscreen, so they're much harder to find and operate while driving the car. (There is a physical hazard lights button in the car, because it's required by law, but it's on the roof so it's extremely unintuitive to press in a hurry.)

I find it very difficult to quickly increase or decrease the temperature even by one step, since I have to keep glancing back and forth between the road and the touchscreen.

This issue is compunded by the software sometimes not responding immediately. I've had instances where I've had to tap to open the temperature controls three times, because I assumed the first tap wasn't registered and pressed again, but it actually was and so it then closed again due to the second tap.

My final gripe with the touchscreen is that everything is buried in so many nested menus. Even the temperature controls, which are probably the most common thing to interact with, are in a popup menu rather than being accessible at all times.

To turn on the fog light requires three taps! You have to tap the car icon at the bottom of the screen to open the main menu (and wait for it to slide up from the bottom), then press the pretty small lighting icon, then tap the button to turn on the fog light. On a normal car, it would be a physical switch on the indicator stalk that you could probably learn to use without looking.

Volvo's solution for avoiding the touchscreen is meant to be asking google assistant to do things for you. But there are some things it straight up can't do, like controlling the lights, and sometimes it does the wrong thing. For example, on multiple occasions I've said "set the heated steering wheel to two" and even though it confirmed it ("okay, setting the steering wheel heater to two") it set it to level three isntead, which I find too warm most of the time.

Google assistant also relies on having a stable internet connection, which is nonexistent when you're driving down country roads away from civilisation, so you'll just get a response of "it looks like there's something wrong with the connection, please try again".

Shining bright

Continuing the theme of changing how controls work, the high beam lights are designed perfectly for you to accidentally dazzle people by flashing them.

There are three modes: dipped, automatic high beam (where the car dips the headlights automatically when there's another car nearby), and manual high beam (where the high beams stay on until you turn them off). That is the order that the car cycles through the modes, and you cannot skip from auto to off using the stalk, which means that if you want to turn off the auto high beams because you've seen a car approaching in the distance and you don't trust automatic mode to keep them dipped, you will always flash them briefly when turning them off.

The only way to dip the lights without turning on manual high beams first is to use the touchscreen, and it's the same number of taps as turning on the fog light and requires confirmation by pressing ok on the steering wheel.

In any other car I've been in that has automatic high beams, switching the automatic behaviour on and off is a button or switch separate to manually controlling them. So if automatic mode is enabled and you want to pre-emptively prevent the high beam activating, you can just disable automatic mode.

Disturbing the peace

This car never seems to shut up! It feels like it's constantly beeping about something or other. I'm not one of those people that hates driving aids and warnings — I actually like having them... when they work as intended. The EX30 is just the embodiment of a false positive.

The most annoying one is the speed limit warning. This is required on new cars due to UK regulations. In the EX30, it's done using road sign detection to read the speed limit and beep at you if you're going too fast. Except the road sign detection is frankly awful. It doesn't read national speed limit signs, meaning it still believes the limit is lower even though it's 60 mph, and therefore beeps even though you're driving perfectly legally.

It also likes to read signs on side roads and junctions — my favourite example of this is the main road I join after leaving home, which has a 40 mph limit, but without fail the car will spot the 10 mph sign from a shopping centre car park and shout at me about it.

Thankfully the speed limit warning can be disabled, which I have to do pretty much every time I get in the car, because it's simply not a useful feature.

A warning that can't be turned off is the "driver attention alert". This uses a sensor behind the steering wheel to constantly watch you as you're driving, and supposedly detect when you're not paying attention or when you're tired and need a break.

There are two problems with this: everything in the car is controlled by a giant touchscreen on my left, which I therefore have to look at to use, thereby incurring the wrath of the attention detection, and the tiredness detection, which seems to mostly try and detect yawning, loves to tell me I need a break if I lick my lips. Even if I've only been driving for two minutes.

In some regions it might be possible to disable these alerts, since there's a button for it in the menu. But in my car at least, that option is disabled and the system cannot be turned off.

My final gripe with the warning systems is with the cross traffic alerts. This is meant to alert you to traffic passing in front of you from the left or right, in case you missed it when pulling out at a junction for instance. But it's far too eager to tell you, such as at roundabouts where by definition there will be traffic crossing from the right!

I believe it's set to trigger the alert if a vehicle is approaching and you haven't come to a complete stop. So you're not allowed to slowly creep forward at a junction to show intent, or to simply slow down without stopping if you can see there's a gap behind the next car as you approach.

Even if it wasn't constantly alerting unnecessarily, I believe the alert occurs far too late to do anything about it. It can only detect vehicles when they get within a certain distance. By the time the car has beeped and you've reacted to it, I think you would have had a collision anyway.

As with the driver attention system, and unlike the RCTA system, this one can't be turned off. There's not even a greyed out setting for it.

There is actually one type of alert which I wish was more prominent in this car, and that's for when a door or the charging flap has been left open. Here's what appears on the screen when the flap is open:

The red part indicating that the problem is the flap is very small, but I suppose if you look closely you can see it. But that photo is much closer than you would be while driving. Here's another look at the image from earlier of the touchscreen — did you notice this warning the first time?

I have definitely driven round with the flap open. In the zoe, a large warning message would appear over the top of the entire driver display that said "flap open", so there was no way to miss it.

Updates giveth, and updates taketh away

When I ordered my car, it was under the premise that it had features like carplay and the ability to use a digital car key in apple wallet. They were in the technical specification of the car on volvo's website. But when I picked up the car from the dealer, both of these features were nowhere to be found.

The person handing over the car at the dealer didn't mention the digital key, and told me that "actually volvo don't put wireless carplay in their cars for safety reasons". That was absolute rubbish (of course, as I now know) and the car didn't even have wired carplay — as I found out later, from reddit of all places, the engineers at volvo just hadn't found a way to get carplay to work properly within the android automotive system yet.

Needless to say, I wasn't particularly happy after getting used to carplay in my previous car. The EX30 does have bluetooth audio, but the experience is so much worse than being able to directly control your phone from the car's screen.

The good thing about a car running on android is the ability to get over-the-air software updates. Thankfully carplay was added in an update, although it was approximately 4 months after I bought the car. I feel sorry for people who had bought theirs even earlier than I did.

The digital key functionality didn't get added until an update in march 2025, so 9 months after buying the car.

There were other things missing that got added in software updates too, like displaying how fast the car is charging in kW, and using road sign information to adjust cruise control speed when the speed limit changes.

But the software updates the car has received haven't all been positive. Some things have been changed that I think are objectively worse. For instance, it used to be that when the car locked it made a loud double beep sound, which was great when using proximity-based locking and unlocking, because you could be sure it had locked after walking away. One of the updates changed that loud sound to a very subtle knocking sound which is almost impossible to hear unless you're standing right next to the car and there's no loud traffic passing by. The only way I can tell the car has locked when walking away is to stare at it and watch for the indicators flashing.

They also keep rearranging the menus in software updates. It used to be that there was a button in the shortcuts row along the bottom of the screen for opening the boot, but that got moved into a submenu so it now takes an extra tap. There also used to be a shortcut for disabling speed limit warnings on the welcome screen that shows when you first get in the car, but that shortcut was removed so now you have to go digging in the menus for that too.

Locked up tight... maybe

Now we get to my biggest issue, and the one that prompted me to write this review in the first place. The EX30 does not have a regular key fob with lock and unlock buttons.

You get an rfid card that you have to place on the driver's door pillar to lock and unlock the car, and a chunky fob that has proximity-based locking and unlocking, where walking up to the car unlocks it, and walking away locks it. Or it should, at least.

Whenever the car is parked outside my house and I go out the front door, it absolutely refuses to unlock as I approach. I end up standing there looking extremely silly, pulling on the door handle (this usually triggers the car to re-check whether the key is nearby) a few times before finally getting into my own car.

Now that I have the digital key in apple wallet, there's a dedicated unlock button on my phone and watch that I can use as if I had a normal key fob, but it's so much slower than if there was a button on the key which is already in my hand as I leave the house.

The digital key is also my only means of unlocking the car from further away to let someone else get into the passenger seat while I lock the door of the house.

When out and about, the proximity unlocking does actually work, most of the time at least. I wonder if there's some sort of timeout on the proximity feature which is being reached while the car is parked at home. It feels like a silly feature if so, requiring another, clunkier method of unlocking.

My other big concern is that there have been some instances where the car didn't lock automatically and I didn't notice. The other day I stopped at lidl, and when I came out of the shop I discovered that the car never actually locked itself and had been sat completely open the entire time.

Since the update that removed the double beep, it's very easy to miss the sound — especially if you're relying on proximity-based locking, because by the time you're far enough away for it to lock, you have no chance of hearing the new sound and you probably can't see the indicators.

It's possible to lock the car when you're standing right next to it, either by tapping the rfid card or by touching a capacitive sensor on the driver's door handle. The touch sensor doesn't always work first time, and I don't like that I have to remember to use it every time or risk an unlocked car.

I think it's an extremely big problem to have these issues with the security system on the car. I should be able to rely on any of the locking methods available to me, and it would be so much simpler if I just had a button on the key that I could press.

To add insult to injury, the battery life on the key fob is atrocious. It lasted about 9 months before I had to get it replaced — by taking it to the volvo garage of course, because it's a featureless rectangle that only they know how to open. They charged me about £10 for what ended up being just a coin cell battery that will probably die again in another 9 months.

Nitpicks

This section is a bit of a lightning round of small issues that are annoying, but not important enough to warrant their own section.

• Media doesn't automatically pause if you park the car and open the driver's door. I almost always listen to podcasts in the car, so I have to manually pause before getting out, otherwise I'll miss a huge chunk of the podcast in the time between getting out and my phone disconnecting.

• Volvo is very proud that there's a harmon kardon soundbar along the front of the car, and it has a shiny silver logo on it that reflects in the windscreen at all times. I 3d printed a black cover for the logo that hides the reflection a little bit but not completely.

• There's a "life detection" feature that sets the alarm off if a person or animal is detected in the car when it's locked. That means a passenger can't stay in the car while the driver goes into a shop or something like that, since all the locking is proximity based. The feature can be temporarily turned off from a setting four levels deep in the menus.

• The front of the car is extremely flat, and it collects so many insects while driving on the motorway that it could start a career in entomology.

  

• The automatic switching of the cruise control speed based on the speed limit doesn't ask for confirmation before changing, so if the car picks up an incorrect speed limit, it'll suddenly hit the brakes.

• The indicator stalk doesn't physically stay in position while the indicator is on, it always returns to the resting position and the car just cancels the indicator after steering. You can push the stalk in the opposite direction to cancel it manually. Except sometimes I go to manually cancel it, but in the meantime the car has already cancelled it, so I end up indicating in the opposite direction. This isn't an issue with a stalk that stays in position while the indicator is active.

Wrap up

I hope it's clear why I've written over 4500 words about this car, because to be honest it feels it was designed by people who don't actually drive a car. The way things work make it feel like they were only ever tested in a simulator or on hardware connected to a computer on a desk, rather than in a real moving car.

In a way, I kind of wanted to warn people about buying an EX30, because I really wouldn't recommend that anyone do so. If you're looking for a car of this size and price, I hear the kia EV3 is an excellent alternative.

For me personally, I can't imagine keeping this car long term. And to that end... a couple of weeks ago I ordered a new renault 5 which is due to be delivered in october. It seems really silly to sell a car when it's only a year old, but I'm so frustrated with the EX30, especially considering the security risk regarding the locking and unlocking problems.

I did an awful lot of research on the renault 5 before ordering, and I paid particular attention to make sure it didn't have any of the issues present on the EX30. The key fob has actual real buttons, there are physical controls for the usual things, and there's a driver display behind the steering wheel. And it still runs android automotive, so I'm not losing out on any features. It feels a lot like a modernised version of the zoe I used to drive.

I am really looking forward to when the new car arrives, mostly because it means I can be rid of the most annoying car I've ever driven.