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I just simply can't believe that Robin Page has designed both ex and xc interiors
I suspect SPA1 cars had more to do w/ Ingenlath, except XC90 which had more to do w/ canx XC90 on P3.
 
Looking at some different reviewers and comments on those. Great driving and comfort. Teslafication is crap with every setting hidden within the screen and no screen in front of driver.
Especially the safety part with having to take your eyes off the road. Volvo stopped caring about their number one branding, weird. The car warns you when you look at it, what?!

I really like it, but the Teslafication is a dealbreaker for me. I really really hope this trend dies, but if it sells well it won’t 😟.
 
Time for fanboys to step up, and this is just the press-release review stage of favorable (?) coverage in exchange for exotic travel. I'm not going to bother posting links to sources; that said, most of the driving/performance experiences seem quite favorable.

Volvo invited us along with a gaggle of journalists to Barcelona where they fed us an astonishing amount of ham

I cannot in any honesty recommend you buy this car. It’s tempting to put it more strongly: do not buy a Volvo EX30... it is frustrating to use to well beyond the point of annoyance

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inside the EX30, Volvo opted for a bare-bones interior with too much hard, cheap plastic in an aggressive bid to keep the sticker price down... Overall, the visual effect is hard to forget—and it doesn’t present as upscale. Instead, it’s the kind of material you might find in the floor of an industrial shop.

Most manufacturers are sensing the temperature on this trend and starting to back out of it... And yet Volvo, the car company that wants to be the world’s most responsible, which gave the world the seat belt, puts safety and responsibility as its guiding tenets, which limited its cars to 112mph and its engines to no more than 2.0-litres and walked away from diesels before most of the world, gives us an interior as frankly unusable on the move as this

the user experience – is all Volvo’s choice and all its own inexcusable doing. Head of safety Thomas Broberg says that the company’s safety experts are “just engineers” and should be “humble” about designing the user interface. I say his teams have done it soundly for decades and that this is not an area where they should become beholden to tech bros who seem to have never asked the question: “Would you like us to make it harder for you to adjust the mirrors, open the glovebox, or switch on the fog light?”

Where its position as the low-cost Volvo does indeed show, however, would be in its interior, and to fully understand what I'm talking about, we need to understand and agree on one thing: physical buttons are expensive. Nearly everything including the opening of the glove box, audio volume, and even the adjustment of mirrors is done within the menus of the vertically oriented, 12.3-inch touchscreen. And the physical buttons that you do get are simplified. Reminiscent of the Volkswagen ID.4, there are just two window switches in the middle that you have to toggle between front and rear.

This Volvo has physical switches only for the front windows (a supplementary button makes them operate the rears)

Opening a glove box shouldn't have to involve software and dropping a rear window shouldn't require two presses.

The window controls must be touch-swiped to switch between front and rear, and you’ll inevitably forget and get this wrong much of the time. This is not progress.

To move your wing mirrors, instead of adjusting manually, you now have to click through two screen options to get to mirror settings, then you must switch to the steering wheel buttons to physically shift the mirrors.

Absolutely infuriating screen system

the tablet comes with all the apps and menus you love to hate. And with no heads-up display option, EX30 drivers might find themselves searching the screen for vehicle information like speed, battery life and whatever the most recent ping is trying to warn you about. My eye was drawn down and to the left, leaving traffic entirely. Of course, Volvo has a million ways to keep a car on the road but it’s still a little disconcerting to not have that information front and center.

cost-cutting is the order of the day here for the brand’s entry-level EV, but the prevailing wind in car design is definitely moving away from “no buttons” toward a varying mixture of touch and physical knobs—and for good reason. It’s a shame Volvo has ignored this.

pitiful ergonomics and usability. If somebody told you the EX30 was a Volvo like no other, I suppose they’d usually mean it as a compliment. With regret, on this occasion, we really don’t.
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New Volvo design chief Jeremy Offer is the first to admit that his “background is not the traditional automotive profile”.

The Brit joined the Swedish firm in May... the bulk of his 20-plus year career has been spent working in industrial design and consulting.
 
Most of those UI and touch screen is one-upping offended virgin play by auto journalists. In all those "reviews", or first drive. There is so little actual substance for making a sensible decision on things that actually matters... I love the guy from Autogefuel and Alex on Auto for these. Tell me how practical it is to put a car seat, to carry grocery stuff, how much I can store with the seats down, how comfortable it is to sit in for 1+h. How good is visibility, interior noise, sound system... Stuff that actually matter to make a decision and use the damn thing on a daily basis.

When using your actual car on a daily basis (alone most of the time), how often you you actually change your climate settings when its auto temp? How often do you open your rear windows? The fricking glove box while rolling? Change the drive modes? Do you not almost always use the volume button on the steering, litterally 1 cm away from where your hand is?

This is all pretend drama and hollow criticism for the sake of criticism... Sure, I would definitely be mildly annoyed to go in menu to adjust/ fine tune my side mirrors, specially in an urban environment and I can understand when you have a passenger they may want to rapidly change volume, but beyond that? This is serious over drama...

And there is that one review complaining that this "family oriented car" was too small to carry family luggage. This is not journalism to any degree, its pure clickbait seriously... Or finding it inconceivable that it was smaller than a Model Y... You know what, a model Y is inconceivably smaller than a Rivian SUV, which is inconceivably smaller than a Hummer, which is smaller than tank, which is smaller than an airplane... Its a tiny city car the size of a chevy bolt ffs... What do you expect?

Guess what, my 240 and 940 had
2 separate controls for wing mirrors and were in the central console. I can only Imagine the extreme issue and confusion it caused auto journalists when the 850 and S70 came out with preposterous toggle switch for the mirrors (L/R)!!! Must have been a boycott or something.... Poor journalists loosing all manners of habits! 😂
 
Actually the initial “press release reviews” tend to be all praise to repay the travel and get invited on the next exotic trip with exquisite fine dining. Then more objective comparisons follow that are between cars and on the reviewer's home turf.

The fact that some negative aspects are slipping out already despite the food in Barcelona is telling.
 
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The EX30 isn't for everyone. Sorry, but I don't care about the back window switches. I rarely lower the back windows. Climate? It's auto climate in my car. However, it is dumb to have a switch on the screen to open the glove box and some functions, like turning on the fog lights, are best going not through the screen. And Volvo really set themselves up for criticism and comparisons to Tesla when they eliminated the driver's display. IMO, that was a mistake.

However, the car's ride/suspension seems to be praised by many journalists and really, it seems to drive better than the Zeekr X it seems and differently. Volvo overall did a nice job on this car and I think it'll sell. I'm not so sure about North America because it is quite a small car and NA folks like their cars bigger.
 
Actually the initial “press release reviews” tend to be all praise to repay the travel/be invited on the next trip. Then comparisons follow that are more objective between cars.

The fact that some negative aspects are slipping out already despite the food in Barcelona is telling.
Well it all depends on how each manufacturer treats with "journalistic freedom" To be sure, Volvo is not acting the same way as other manufacturers are. The most severe one I have first hand knowledge in dictating how journalists make reviews is VAG.

Case in point, my previous neighbor is a car reviewer. He was banned from ever getting his hands on Audi, Porsche (and maybe VW too but I don't recall totally) cars about three years ago because his review of the the just launched Q8 was quite critical of the vehicle and recommended against buying that car. Audi Canada commanded him to take down and change his review using their "revised" wordings to soften his criticism. He did not at the time, so he lost all access to these cars for a good while.

Since he depends on having cars weekly for his own family transportation and family trips (his own car was a Fiat 500 for a family of 5, not a joke!), he revised his review 1 year later, and magically he was now enjoying family transportation for a nice 2-3 weeks in a Q7, followed by 1 week driving a 911 and Taycan back to back... Lol if that is not market manipulation what is...

From what I understood from him, most generalist carmaker and even Korean luxury don't care much for what is written. But Volvo is very small, especially here in Canada, and they don't offer a lot of perks alongside their press cars. No special track day like BMW or mud day like Land Rover.

I used to think finding out what these journalists actually drive daily in their private time was a good way to finding out some truth. But the sad truth is these guys don't even care about reliability of their own cars, because they just don't drive them! My friend's Fiat 500 was in service 28 times in the first 2 years he had it, it was an absolute cancer, but he just didn't care as he always was toying with nicer ones...

Make what you will of these early reviews, but like most of those youtube reviews, they are mostly "impressions" to get ad revenue... And mostly garbage...
 
Actually the initial “press release reviews” tend to be all praise to repay the travel/be invited on the next trip. Then comparisons follow that are more objective between cars.

The fact that some negative aspects are slipping out already despite the food in Barcelona is telling.
These are initial driving impression on pre-production cars. Negative aspects are in any car. And of course you find something about the window switches because you've been harping on this repeatedly since the EX90 was shown. Overall, the EX30 is well received and some of the criticisms of the car is true of a lot of modern cars with screen controls. But it drives well and maybe Volvo has added the supple ride compliance many Volvo fans have been hoping for. Further tests will reveal more over more broken pavement but I hope so.
 
the driver needs to check out the center screen for basic information like speed, battery level, and driving range. This leads to a ridiculous situation where the driver-facing camera system alerts the driver that they're not paying attention to the road, when in fact the driver is forced to look at the center screen to make sure he's not speeding and has enough juice to the next charger.
 
I don’t think EX30 is well received. Driving comfort gets a big plus, but rarely have I seen so much criticism of an interface, especially the safety aspect of it.

And the interior gets “but it works”, not raving.

One pedal driving is not good either and in typical new Volvo way there are zero settings for it.

I think they dropped the ball on many things and by letting go of some safety anspects and dumbing down on everything they have let their Volvo history down.

Not surprising since only designers from Volvo was part of this project. Number of engineers involved can be counted on your fingers.
 
The Polestar 2 is probably one of the most thorough EVs available, at a strikingly low price. Yes, it's a bit more on the conservative side, with drivers display, "gear lever", car key, physical buttons and so on. Conservative, but very pleasing in terms of haptics and aesthetics. I just can't understand that all these things are soooo expensive to build. For me, these things would be worth paying an extra premium over a Tesla, because Volvo is a premium brand unlike VW or TesOf course I would buy an EV60 even if it has the same missing features as the EX30, they are not a show stopper for me. Still, I can't see this as a progress.

What made me change my opinion was that quote posted by rfkuehn "that the driver-facing camera system alerts the driver that they're not paying attention to the road, when in fact the driver is forced to look at the center screen to make sure he's not speeding and has enough juice to the next charger." This is so ridiculous.

They have a whole team working on ergonomics, right? And another team testing the cars in everyday situations? From their previous jobs, Jim Rowan and Jeremy Offer in the first place should know a lot about human centricity and user experience? Human centricity is even a core value of the Volvo brand. Probably not as important as cost-cutting. I hope these things only affect the 30 series and the next cars will be better.
 
Jim Rowan and Jeremy Offer in the first place should know a lot about human centricity and user experience? Human centricity is even a core value of the Volvo brand. Probably not as important as cost-cutting. I hope these things only affect the 30 series and the next cars will be better.
Jeremy Offer only arrived in May after Robin Page was "demoted," "losing the top design job at Volvo" (per Automotive News). The fix will take years - just look at VW and add customary Volvo delays to that timeline.

"It came as a surprise to many industry watchers when it was announced on the last day of January 2023 that auto veteran Page was being nudged out of his Volvo head of global design role by car design unknown Jeremy Offer, a seasoned industrial designer formerly at electric van start-up Arrival."
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As for Rowan -
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I don’t think EX30 is well received. Driving comfort gets a big plus, but rarely have I seen so much criticism of an interface, especially the safety aspect of it.

And the interior gets “but it works”, not raving.

One pedal driving is not good either and in typical new Volvo way there are zero settings for it.

I think they dropped the ball on many things and by letting go of some safety anspects and dumbing down on everything they have let their Volvo history down.

Not surprising since only designers from Volvo was part of this project. Number of engineers involved can be counted on your fingers.

It's being very well received. A lot of people are raving about the overall car. I think it'll get the same accolades the XC40 got when it was new.
 
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