Volvo EX30 Review

The EX30 gets a great deal right. It is small in a way almost nothing electric is, it looks properly designed rather than merely styled, the single motor version makes 268 horsepower and the twin motor reaches sixty in about three and a half seconds, which in a car this size is faintly absurd. Volvo's material choices are interesting and the claimed lifetime carbon footprint is the lowest the company has recorded.

Then you get in. There is no instrument display in front of the driver, so your speed lives in the corner of a central screen. There is no glovebox where a glovebox belongs. The door cards carry no speakers, because the sound comes from a bar across the dashboard, which is clever and leaves the doors feeling hollow. The software launched genuinely unfinished and needed a long run of updates to become tolerable. Rear space is tight and the boot is small. As a second car it makes sense. As the car you drive daily it demands patience.