Volvo EX30 - long-term-review

TopGear.com is dusting off an old record for this instalment of Living With A Fast Electric Volvo Hatchback, and it’s one we intermittently return to: cars are not like mobile phones and so don’t need massive touchscreens. Buttons and dials: really rather good, as it turns out.

As the three or four of you out there who regularly follow this limited series will no doubt recall, we’ve swapped out of our long-term and suddenly yellow EX30 Single Motor Extended Range and are now holding on quite gamely inside an EX30 Cross Country.

Long story short: more power, more sunroof, more seat, less yellow, more beige.

So far, it’s been as easy to operate as the yellow car, only with more. Which is to say, it’s fast, grippy, lightly distant in its feedback, offers a decent level of equipment and remains a lovely thing to behold.

Well, the driving part has been easy. But it shares the yellow car’s problem – as it does with all EX30s and most modern machinery, for that matter – in that everything is on the touchscreen. Everything.

Manufacturers must surely think that because everyone’s using a smartphone, our cars need to feature smartphone-esque functionality. But you’re not travelling at national speed limits on your phone, are you? You’re probably just sat on the sofa or walking into a lamppost while watching a reel of a Golden Retriever doing something funny. Again.

We’ve long decried this issue in the EX30 – my trusted colleague Paul Horrell has written at length about the various pitfalls of the screen – but it’s worth repeating because now we've got what you’d call ‘lived experience’.

Want to adjust climate on the go? Changing the temperature and fan speed/direction are on two different menus. Click the temp number at the bottom and a half-screen pops up allowing you to set whatever temp feels comfortable, and also the heated seats/steering wheel, which is… OK, not great, but fine.

Want to change where that temperature is directed though? Another click and a different full screen pops up. Humans aren’t robots (yet), people have hot flushes, or suddenly get cold. Dogs too. So temperatures and airflow need adjusting on the fly, and this system is just plain clunky to use.

Then there’s the speedo. Why isn’t this on a simple LCD display or head-up display in your eyeline? Volvo can afford to fit a driver’s monitor atop the wheel to see where you’re looking – at the screen trying to adjust the temperature! – and then tell you off for not looking where you’re supposed to – at the road because you're trying to adjust the temperature! – but surely a simpler and safer thing would be to just put a speedo there instead.

(Plus – and your YMMV of course – while looking left at the speedo might cost the same amount of time as looking down, according to Volvo, our peripheral vision changes when looking left. It's just distracting. And forces us to unlearn decades of experience.)

How about if you're trying to reverse into a parking space? The live feed is useful, but you can't dip the mirrors to see the kerb because those controls are in another menu, and that menu is disabled when trying to reverse park.

Oh, that's right - simply trying to adjust the wing mirrors is a push to see the car menu, then mirror, then select left or right, then adjust, then hit OK to save. The headlights are automatic, but if you want to adjust them? Again, that's a few button pushes away. Not great UX, as the devs might say.

Trying to turn the volume up or down? Admittedly the buttons on the steering wheel are fine, but every now and then they don't respond, so you have to keep clicking away. There's also a slider on the touchscreen but that's impossible to operate on the move.

And then comes the whole principle of the thing: software is easier and quicker and cheaper to update than hardware, so removing hard points from the cabin like buttons and dials and so on reduces cost. But this EX30 CC isn’t cheap because it starts at £47k.

(Speaking of updates, interestingly, Volvo has today — 25 Feb — announced a new UX that offers "completely redesigned settings and controls systems" that apparently "bring the right controls closer at hand", along with a "customisable content bar that lets you use the space for predictive actions or the actions most important to you". An implicit admission that the current setup isn't working? In any case, these updates will be rolled out to new and existing EX30s over the summer.)

Yes, in fairness the screen is quick to respond and looks lovely in isolation, but like we said up top, a car is not like a mobile phone. Heck, even the creator of the iPhone Sir Jony Ive was quoted as saying touchscreens are "the wrong technology" to serve as a car's primary interface.

Last June, we said that only time will tell if the touchscreen would drive us up the wall. Eight months later… were climbing up it, for sure.