When the Volvo EX30 subcompact electric crossover launched in 2023, it raised quite a few eyebrows due to its minimalist interior that moved almost all controls and driving information to a single 12.3-inch tablet-style central touchscreen.
As you can imagine, that wasn’t the best idea. Pretty much every review of the Volvo EX30 has pointed out that the infotainment screen is the crossover’s biggest problem by far. The central screen is known to crash frequently, which is a big problem because many vehicle functions are buried in it, such as the climate control, mirror adjustments, glove box opening, and more.
If you want to know how bad the situation is, online automotive guide Edmunds has been running a Volvo EX30 for a while now and their verdict is unforgiving for the Chinese-made Swedish crossover’s digital tech.
What Did Go Wrong?
The 2025 EX30 owned by the outlet is part of its one-year test fleet, which means that the reviewers have had plenty of time with the EV to be able to offer credible, non-biased feedback. There’s no way to sugarcoat this, so here it is: the EX30 is described as an “absolute tech nightmare,” which may sound excessive until you read the reviewer’s actual experience with the vehicle.
According to the article, Volvo has gone too far with the EX30 when it comes to interior austerity. Nearly everything goes through the “slow-reacting touchscreen, and the handful of remaining physical controls are weird,” the author notes, pointing to the switches that open and close the rear windows, which are the same as the fronts, so you need to touch a toggle button first.
According to the reviewer, “the tech gets in the way of nearly everything you need to do with the EX30,” even when going to a car wash. Upon taking the EX30 to a car wash, even though “car wash mode” was activated (a six-step operation, by the way) and the transmission was put in Neutral, the car refused to comply as the automatic parking brake had engaged unknowingly, even though car wash mode was on.
The trouble is there’s no physical button to engage or disengage the parking brake; to shut it off, the driver needs to tap the brake pedal, but the reviewer learned that through trial and error and the entire car wash had to be shut down until he figured it out.
"Overly Sensitive" Driver Monitor Camera Makes Driving a Hassle
Then there’s the Volvo EX30’s safety suite. Turning the driver aids on is easy via a steering wheel button, but if you want to adjust the following distance when active cruise control is on or the lane keeping assistant, you’re forced to use the touchscreen. In doing so, you have to take your eyes off the road, which triggers “the overly sensitive driver monitor camera.”
Almost every time the driver needs to look at the touchscreen—and they need to do that a lot since so many basic features are buried in the screen—the driver monitoring system issues an alert, and it does so even when taking a long turn on a winding road because the steering wheel blocks the monitoring camera placed atop the steering column.
Is there a solution to all these nagging tech bugs? Edmunds believes that bringing back physical buttons is it, and it looks like some automakers and regulators are coming to the same conclusion. Volkswagen, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, and Hyundai are reintroducing physical buttons back in their cars, while China and Europe have recently adopted regulations to curb screen-heavy car interiors.
from Autoblog News https://ift.tt/zKpw2hA
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