A Volvo, but not as we know it. It’s a smaller car than they’ve done for decades. And it’s also electric-only. Volvo calls it a crossover, but really it’s just a tall hatch.
If you want something more crossoveresque, an EX30 Cross Country will go on sale later. Its body is slightly jacked up and clad in black plastic, and it rolls on more rugged tyres.
The most remarkable EX30 is the 422bhp twin-motor version. It’s startlingly rapid. The 0-62mph is a 3.6-second kick up the chuff. And it can be bought for £41k.
The 268bhp single-motor EX30 has swarms of rivals. The VW ID.3 and Cupra Born are almost exactly the same length, width and height, yet have notably more space. We like the Renault Megane E-Tech Electric. The EX30 shares a platform with the Smart #1. You could have a Hyundai Kona Electric. Or, from the Stellantis Group you could look at the mutually related electric Peugeot e-2008, DS3 E-Tense, Jeep Avenger, Vauxhall Mokka or Fiat 600e.
People are getting excited because in its small, 51kWh battery spec this is a Volvo (a posh brand) for the price of a BYD or MG. Provided you can manage with less electric range.
Looks good…
Yup. Nothing falsely sporty, despite the startling performance of the top version. It’s like a Volvo but smaller. The lights, disciplined surfaces and chunky stance do the trick. At the front there’s no grille between the ‘Thor’s hammer’ lights, but the Volvo badge and diagonal stripe help define a face. It’s always two-tone unless you get all-over black.
The EX30 sits on an electric-only platform shared with other Geely brands including the Smart #1. So after being styled in Sweden it was developed in China. But Volvo is unsurprisingly quick to say the EX30 has its own standard of safety. For now it’s built only in China but from 2025 it’ll be coming out of a plant in Belgium too.
Inside we find a choice of tasteful sets of trim material. For a change none are black and none of the seat choices use leather or an impersonation of it.
The interior has some canny storage spaces. As in many flat-floor EVs, they take advantage of the absence of a central tunnel. But it’s a bit cramped in the back even for a car that’s smallish end-to-end.
Most striking about the cabin is the simplicity. This helps reduce the parts count, making it cheaper and lower-impact to make. Same reason, they say, for the dash having almost no switches. Click on to the Interior tab of this review for more cabin details.
Volvo: smart, safe, sustainable eh?
Yup. The low-CO2 trick of EVs is something this car leans into so far it’s almost horizontal. There are almost no switches on the dash – not even for lights or mirror adjustment: it’s all on the screen. That saves manufacturing cost and CO2. The trim uses recycled materials including the waste from jeans factories, fishing nets, disposable plastic bottles and even chopped-up uPVC window frames.
Now we hear a lot of this stuff from carmakers and it’s often window dressing, but Volvo provides actual figures to show it’s significant: more than one-sixth of the plastic in the whole car is recycled, one-sixth of the steel and one-quarter of the aluminium.
The base model has LFP battery cathodes. These use more abundant minerals with less energy-intensive mining and manufacture than the ones in the longer-range, 64kWh NMC battery. The Volvo factory and those of nearly all suppliers use entirely renewable energy.
The audited CO2 footprint of a base-model EX30 out of the factory is only 18 tonnes; not much more than many petrol rivals. The UK electricity it uses to drive for an 8,000-mile year emits about 0.4 tonnes of power-station CO2, where a petrol car would emit 1.8 tonnes from its exhaust. So the EX30’s lifetime CO2 is about half that of a petrol.
How does it go?
Even the slow one is quick. Zero-to-62 in 5.7s, and the long-range version is slightly quicker still because the battery can flow more current. For the headline 3.6-second sprint, you need the twin-motor version.
Range is 215 miles WLTP for the base version, then with the bigger-capacity pack you get 278-297 miles, depending on spec. We saw about 245 miles on a warm day.
The steering is quick but numb, the rear-drive traction undramatic. It feels neat and compact, pivoting under you tidily but without engaging you. The ride is well-judged, with controlled damping but good shock isolation.
For more, click through to the Driving tab.
What's the verdict?
“For the money, the Volvo EX30 looks like a bargain compared with rivals. But it's cramped in the back…”
It feels strong and refined, with a neat-looking cabin. That’ll please Volvo buyers. For the brand image for the money, it looks like a bargain compared with rivals. But really its cabin feels cheaper than a Renault Megane’s. It’s also cramped in the back. Even the little Jeep Avenger is roomier.
The control-screen system looks good but it’s properly annoying to use. The only way it won’t distract you is if you have the discipline not to change climate, audio or driving settings on the move.
Otherwise we really admire the design of this cabin. Not just because of the elegant simplicity, but for the sustainability angle.
Bottom-line: unless you’re sat in the back, or diving deep into the screen menus just to turn on the fog lights, this is a likeable and admirable car.
Renault Megane E-Tech Electric
Volkswagen ID.3
£29,565 – £40,495
Hyundai Kona Electric
£17,240 – £40,895
Continue reading: Driving
Driving
What is it like to drive?
It’s certainly decent down the road. The steering is quick off-centre but disconcertingly light. It took us a couple of hours to acclimatise. Once you’re keyed into it, this is a fairly agile car, exploiting its smallness and disguising its rather porky mass. The rear-drive traction keeps things neutral under power.
Impressively, it combines this with a cushioned yet well-damped ride that polishes off big bumps and small irritations with little fuss or noise. The brakes meld regen and friction seamlessly.
What happens when I put my foot down?
The Extended Range Single Motor one (268bhp, 253lb ft) does 0-62mph in the low fives. Quick enough. You’ll be wondering why the Twin Motor version (422bhp, 400lb ft) – a £41k Volvo mini-SUV – needs a 0-62mph time of 3.6 seconds. The chief engineer told us it doesn’t, but they’re the same motors as used in other Geely brands that share this platform, including the Smart #1 Brabus, and he couldn’t see the point of de-rating them.
So 3.6s it is. Its suspension is tuned to feel very similar to the Single Motor EX30. “This is not a sports car.” No kidding.
It’s a Volvo, so no doubt chocka with safety assistance?
Yup, you get all the forward alerts for vehicles and pedestrians. Side alerts warn you if you’re about to open a door on a cyclist or car, or reverse into crossing traffic. There are 360-degree parking cameras too.
The support at road speeds works well too: there’s little of the over-excitable bonging and wheel-grabbing of some recent Chinese EVs, or even Mercedes. The motorway adaptive cruise and lane centring system nudges the steering and speed smoothly enough.
As usual you can change the time interval to the car in front. But only by taking a deep menu-dive, while it’s usual for cars to have a steering wheel button for this. You might well want to adjust it at speed, say when merging from a quiet motorway where following close is silly, to a busy one where following close is necessary to discourage other traffic from jumping into the gap.
Tell me about the range.
It’s a max of 298 miles WLTP for the 18-inch wheels and rear-drive. We saw a 245-mile range (efficiency of 3.8mi/kWh from that 64kWh unit, fact fans), and the Twin Motor wasn’t much different. In normal mode it declutches its front motor in gentle driving. Sports mode keeps it engaged all the time. But anyway, we were impressed that it made more than 80 per cent of WLTP when we weren’t hanging about.
But note that the smaller-battery version (51kWh and 215 miles WLTP) gets a heat pump and battery heating only if you spring for Ultimate trim. Otherwise it might be a 150-mile car in winter.
Previous: Overview
Continue reading: Interior
Interior
What is it like on the inside?
The whole cabin is designed to save energy and materials and component numbers, done with a modern Scandi-minimalist vibe that we find very attractive. The dash has few mouldings, the vents are simple but effective, the doors have materially light but comfy armrests.
Part of the dash is a soundbar, which saves trim, and also opens up bigger door bins. Enabled by its EV flat floor, there’s a versatile storage console down the centre.
The front seats are soft yet supportive. We struggle to see why the wheel is so square. It doesn’t improve visibility of the road. This isn’t an F1 car.
But I see no switches, no instruments…
Yup, this is where the minimal-parts thing grates with us. As with the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y, there’s no driver’s instrument pod, so you have to look left as well as down. Fair enough, you get used to it and Volvo has timed the eye movement and says it’s not materially different from a speedo mounted straight ahead. But we found ourselves more likely to miss things like pop-up navigation instructions.
And then the menus. Oh the menus. Even the mirror adjustment, never mind the climate controls, are resident on-screen. Think how often you have to adjust the mirrors when manoeuvring. Things you might want to do in a hurry, like turning on the foglights, take the same number of finger-jabs – four – as things you adjust only when parked, like the charge schedule.
There is a quick-access menu, but they chose eccentric things to live there: why is changing ambient light colour so urgent?
It’s a good-looking and responsive screen, but the hierarchy of menus is wrong for us, and it’s nowhere near customisable enough. You should at least be able to choose your own buttons on the quick menu. Maybe they’ll do an OTA update to fix this.
Bizarrely, although you need to go into the screen to adjust the mirrors, the electric seats – standard on the Ultimate spec – have actual switches.
What’s it like in the rear?
Life isn’t great in the back. The tight legroom and high floor raise your knees acutely, making it feel cramped. A let-down given the EX30 is as long overall as a VW ID.3.
There’s a decent, 400-litre boot with a double floor (make that 904 litres with the seats down), and a 61-litre frunk that’s small but useful for your charging cable and other grubby knick-knacks (like spare letter ks if you prefer the spelling nick-nacks).
Previous: Driving
Continue reading: Buying
Buying
What should I be paying?
The launch range is simple. Start with two trims: Plus at £33,795 and Ultimate at £42,045. The latter gets electric seats, 20-inch wheels, glass roof, self-parking, surround cameras and acceptance of 22kW three-phase AC charging.
On that, you choose between three powertrains: small-battery RWD is the price above. Big-battery RWD (with heat pump and battery heating for more consistent winter range) adds £4,750, and big-battery AWD is another £2,450 above that. So yeah, you can get the absurdly fast one for just £40,995.
The only combo you can’t have is Ultimate trim with the small battery. A slightly more stripped out Core trim level will arrive after a year or so, bringing an electric Volvo to a tempting £32k or so.
As if to show EVs are cheaper to maintain, the EX30 comes as standard with three years or 62,000 miles of servicing, as well as wear and tear including brakes (not tyres), and roadside rescue.
All paint and trim colours are the same price, so none of the traditional car-industry gouging there. The black roof is included too.
And on finance?
For the extended range RWD Plus on a PCP it’s £5,500 down and £512 a month over four years at 8,000 miles a year, with a final option to buy at £19,300. For a lease on the same deposit and term it’s £530 a month from Volvo, but as it’s a lease there’s no option to buy.
Or, for the commitment-phobic, there’s Volvo’s no-commitment Subscription scheme, where you pay £947 a month with nothing down and no obligation to keep going beyond three months.
Hit me with some charging info.
Replenishing from 10-80 per cent on an ultra-rapid charger takes about 26-28 minutes in ideal conditions for both sizes of battery. So the smaller one is drawing less peak power, because of course it gets you less far on 80 per cent than the big one.
For AC the 64kWh Ultra spec car has a 22kW three-phase onboard charger, for a sub-four hour charge. But you’ll most likely have a 7.4kW single phase outlet at home, and indeed on most street-side posts. They give an 11-hour flat-to-full. On a standard tariff you’re looking at a £17 full top-up for the smaller battery, and perhaps a fiver more for the bigger one.
Warranty is three years/60k miles, except for the battery which is eight years/100k miles.
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