When Volvo first announced it would build an electric crossover for Generation Z, a great number of people thought “Yeah, right.” After all, Volvos are luxury cars and Gen Z likely won’t be dropping luxury car money anytime soon. However, the 2025 Volvo EX30 doesn’t cost luxury car money. It’s a tiny, reasonably-priced EV that may soon be everywhere by virtue of affordability. Let’s dive in and see how Volvo did it.
At just 166.7 inches long, the Volvo EX30 is just over a foot shorter than a Honda Civic hatchback. However, it’s also surprisingly wide at 72.3 inches (80 inches including the mirrors), and reasonably tall at 61.1 inches. Although it shares a model prefix with the big EX90 electric crossover, think of the EX30 as more of a hatchback, especially since a ruggedized Cross Country version is on its way to take care of the crossover side of things.
Once you swap over to sunny, European hatchback-tinted lenses, the EX30 starts to make a bit more sense. Its color palette includes some unusually upbeat colors for Volvo such as the pastel Cloud Blue and the vibrant Moss Yellow, both of which are said to be inspired by Sweden’s coast. What’s more, this baby Volvo truly promises to be the baby of the range with an MSRP comparable to a similar gasoline-powered vehicle. More on that in a bit.
On the inside, Volvo appears to have saved costs by speccing a very simple interior. The EX90 gets a single 12.3-inch touchscreen in the center of the dashboard for infotainment and instrumentation, a column-mounted electronic shifter, a bank of window switches in the center console, and that’s it. Even the sound system array has been tucked up into the dashboard in a single soundbar, which carves out space in the door cards and reduces the number of wires in each door.
Unfortunately, the minimalist interior design comes with some drawbacks. There are no physical climate or audio controls, and Volvo’s gone down the same dumb road as VW by obfuscating rear window actuation behind a capacitive touch pad. Oh, and the glovebox door release is electronically-actuated through the touchscreen because of course it is. I guess electronic latches are cheap these days. At least Volvo had the common sense to retain physical wiper controls on the left steering column stalk, but still.
However, even though the EX30 is designed to be cheap, it doesn’t seem like a penalty box on first glance. Interesting materials pepper the cabin, from spotted trim to metal accents to blue textiles. It’s the same sort of philosophy that makes the Ford Maverick’s cabin cheap and cheerful, so I have high hopes for this baby Volvo. You can even get it in four interior colors, none of which are black. There’s a cool off-white called Breeze, a warm grey called Mist, a green called Pine, and a deep blue called Indigo. There’s no word yet on which exterior colors and interior colors go together, but yellow over blue would be a proper spec. Regardless of which upholstery color you choose, everything’s made with renewable and recycled materials, so there’s some feel-good in the fabric. Oh, and those four upholstery colors are paired with five user-selectable ambient lighting schemes including one inspired by the northern lights. Aurora Borealis? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within an electric Volvo? Yes.
Interestingly, although many automakers are eyeing proprietary infotainment systems, Volvo is still taking a collaborative approach with a Google-based OS and Apple CarPlay available from day one, a great package that really seems to understand the needs of this car’s target market. Volvo cites mobile hardware giant Qualcomm as a key tech partner in the media release for the EX30, so it feels reasonable to expect a fast, fluid infotainment UX.
What about the bits that make it go? The base rear-wheel-drive model features a 69 kWh gross, 64 kWh net usable capacity Nickel Manganese Cobalt lithium-ion battery juicing a single electric motor to the tune of 268 horsepower and 253 lb.-ft. of torque. Volvo estimates EPA range of 275 miles, but this EV is about more than just range. Because it’s so small and uses so few resources, Volvo estimates the EX30 will have a well-to-wheel carbon footprint of fewer than 30 tons over 124,000 miles on the EU27 energy mix. For those in areas with greener grids, that number could be even less.
However, if you happen to be a speed merchant, take note of what Volvo calls the Twin Motor model, for it claims to be the quickest Volvo ever. It uses the same battery pack as the standard car but puts a second motor on the front axle for a combined output of 422 horsepower and 400 lb.-ft. of torque. Zero-to-60? A claimed 3.4 seconds, a tenth quicker than a Tesla Model Y Performance. All-wheel-drive models are also capable of DC fast charging at 153 kW, a solid figure, if not industry-leading. Regardless of which powertrain you choose, the EX30’s Google-based infotainment should make battery preconditioning easier. As soon as state of charge drops below 20 percent, the EX30 automatically pulls up a list of nearby charging stations on Google Maps. Once a charging station is selected, the car starts preconditioning its battery pack to better accept high-current charging. That’s smart. Plus, a built-in 5G modem means the EX30 should be connected to the internet for the life of most examples.
Oh, and we haven’t even reached the best bit of the EX30 yet — the price. This sensible Swedish EV starts at $36,145 including an $1,195 freight charge. That’s genuinely inexpensive by U.S.-market EV standards, however it likely won’t qualify for tax credits due to overseas production. Although pre-orders are open now, expect deliveries to start in Summer 2024, not surprising given the car’s 2025 model year. From what we’re seeing today, it seems like it could be worth the wait.
(Photo credits: Volvo)
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I like this a lot, but want it to be cheaper… so sue me.
The coming Chevy EV Equinox is supposed to MSRP for $30K, and even if it’s little more than an electrified version of the current Trailblazer, I think they’ll sell as many as they can make for the first few years at least. SOMEONE will have the good sense to offer a small EV pickup, be it a Ford Maverick or Toyota Stout for about that price too. If Mitsubishi had a lick of sense and wanted an actual comeback in the American market, they’d manage to offer a small/practical/unfancy EV unibody pickup truck that managed a range of 200 miles, and sell base models for no more than say $27K.
Volvo, if you’re going to expect me to drive a car without any actual buttons in it, please have the entry level model start under $30K. Kudos on actual colors for the exterior and especially interior too though. 🙂
I’ve seen the C40 in person while driving on Sunset. It was a kind of cool medium grey that almost every manufacturer seems to offer now (none look nicer in that color than that first Neiman Marcus edition Audi TT though). Though it’s got that coupe/SUV form factor, it’s detailing and pleasant chunkyness made it visually less offensive than all the Mercedes and BMW coupe/SUVs zooming all over Los Angeles at the moment.
The only downside here is the NMC battery…
Probably hard to fit enough range into something this size with current LFPs.
Lack of instrumentation in front of the driver is a showstopper for me. I get that people buy the Model 3, but those people are fools. Tesla cheaped out because they could get away with it, not because it’s better.
So what’s with touchscreen actuated glove compartments? Are car companies that f***ing clueless or is there some reason for it?
Could it be a security thing?(as in window smashers cant access it)
Maybe fewer parts to deal, I don’t know how exactly it works, but I can imagine it is a single part, and also you can implement a lock with software, so you have a cleaner look.
Still annoying.
A button could solve this, I think, at least it would not be necessary to power up the enitre screen if I just forgot to pick or put something in the glove box after I turned off the car.
A soundbar? Are there no rear speakers? I could (begrudgingly) live with the touchscreen controlling most everything but a shit sound system (that will probably be next to impossible to upgrade) is a non-starter. First GM saying “No” to CarPlay and Android Auto and now this? What’s going on?! It sucks because this Volvo was checking off all the right boxes for me.
As a gen z, it feels really fricking weird to be marketed to by a car company… and they still seem pretty out of touch in terms of what we can afford, but this is not a bad try honestly.
I’ll take a yellow one with green interior please and thank you, but I have nothing but contempt for the electronic latch on the glovebox so I’ll be violently ripping that out and replacing it with a mechanical latch of my choice, and since I’m going into engineering I’ll be devoting much thought to ripping out the screen and replacing it with buttons as well. Screw smart-devicing everything, I want more dumb devices. Stop un-inventing the button, I demand tactile feedback!
Also it looks like dropping the suspension an inch or four would improve the looks nicely…
I guess when it comes to Gen Z, all the media outlets spent the last few years pushing articles claiming that youths don’t want to ever learn how to drive because they could just Facetime their friends. But marketing to a generation specifically is certainly nothing new for Millennials or Gen X.
Toyota had whole project names around their programs, which eventually lead to Scion.
Afford it? Hey, Honda’s customer profile for the Element were active early 20something males that didn’t even have a job!
I hear you on getting rid of all this touch screen crap. I can’t stand the things. Even when they are working correctly, they often misjudge the user’s intent and what the user is pressing. They are frustrating to work with. Buttons do what you tell the devices to do 100% of the time, as long as the buttons are working.
I build my EVs “dumb” on purpose. Less crap to go wrong, less crap I’ll later have to fix, and if I do have to fix it, it can at least be fixed.
Also, good luck entering the world of engineering. I’m an electrical engineer myself, employed in my field. If I had to do it over again, I’d have dropped out of high school and sold crack, mainly because the things I’m engineering for a living have nothing to do with what I wanted to do as an actual career goal. Maybe someday I’ll get there, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon. Student loans definitely fucked me during those years where having money could have allowed me to accomplish my goals, but those are gone now. A number of my peers, aren’t so fortunate. If you have plans, just realize that there will likely be factors outside of your control that wreck them.