2025
Volvo EX30

Yes, display—singular. There’s only one screen that doubles as a gauge cluster and infotainment system. The clock and temperature text displays are tiny. Annoyingly, if you change settings using physical controls or if a warning goes off, a pop-up message will block most of the screen. It feels like navigating an early-2000s website.

At CR, we’re big fans of direct driver monitoring systems (DDMS) that prevent drivers from abusing features like adaptive cruise control and lane centering assistance by sounding an alarm when drivers’ eyes aren’t looking at the road. However, Volvo’s DDMS reveals the EX30’s fundamental flaw: Multiple testers complained that the car warned them for looking away from the road while they were checking the speedometer or trying to interact with the radio or turn on the fog lights on the center screen. Every time it beeped, it felt like the car was admitting how distracting its displays and controls are. It also created further distraction by forcing drivers to look back at the center screen to see what error message had popped up to accompany the beep. If Volvo doesn’t want us looking away from the road, its designers should’ve put the speedometer and other vital gauges in view of the driver instead of in the middle of the car!

Although drivers praised the EX30’s ability to handle securely in corners, they were disappointed by how vague its steering felt. We like it when a car’s steering wheel offers a visceral connection between car and driver. It helps improve confidence in curves by communicating pavement texture and how much cornering load the vehicle has taken on. However, the EX30’s steering is devoid of any sense of what the car is up to. That’s true even when the steering feel is electronically set to “Firm” in the controls.

There are three ways to lock/unlock the EX30. You can use a phone app, you can tap a credit-card-sized “key” against the driver’s door pillar, or you can carry a traditional proximity key fob in your pocket. But that fob is devoid of any buttons. If you want to unlock the car from a distance so a family member can grab something out of the trunk or start loading luggage, and you don’t have the app set up on your phone, you’re out of luck. Key fobs have had buttons for 40 years. Why take that feature away now?

The bottom of the rear door opening is extremely narrow—about the same as a men’s size 11 shoe. That makes it challenging to step in and out of the vehicle. We’ll be interested to see what, if any, effect the door shape has on lifting a kid in and out of a child car seat.

What We’ll Keep an Eye On

Sometimes, the car displayed temperatures in Celsius. Sometimes, Bluetooth wouldn’t connect. Sometimes, Apple CarPlay would stop working. When we used the wireless charger, it would sometimes cover the screen with a warning to clear the charger of keys, even though there was nothing there but a phone. Prior navigation destinations would disappear and reappear. Although the infotainment system is based on Google software, it’s not compatible with Android Auto. We hope that future software updates will fix some of these issues.

There are nooks and crannies, but we’re not yet quite sure how to use them. The space between the front seats is ideal for a purse, but storing anything there blocks the space below. A tiny front trunk, or “frunk,” cannot fit the portable charging cable that came with the car, which is a strange oversight. There’s a storage bin for rear passengers that just sort of sits there instead of sliding in and out of place, and there aren’t any rear cup holders. And most maddening of all, the glove compartment sits underneath the center screen and will too easily whack the driver and passenger on the knee when opened.

There’s only one way to adjust the intensity of the EX30’s regenerative braking. Many of us found the default setting too intense and deactivated it, only to encounter what felt like the normal sort of coasting you’d experience in a gas-powered car. Several drivers said that the “One Pedal Driving” option was too weak and took too long to slow the vehicle to a complete stop.

The controls for adaptive cruise control (ACC) are spread across steering wheel buttons and the gear selector, and are sometimes duplicated. Pressing the up and down buttons adjusts the cruise control speed in 5 mph increments; you have to hold them down to make 1 mph adjustments.

Many drivers don’t like using lane keeping assistance (LKA), which will vibrate the steering wheel to let you know if you drift over a lane line. Unlike automatic emergency braking or blind spot warning, LKA isn’t proven to prevent crashes. The EX30’s LKA system is particularly zealous, especially on the sort of narrow country roads near our auto test center. Most cars allow you to turn off LKA once and for all, but the EX30 forces you to turn it off every time you start the vehicle. The same is true for the DDMS.