Disappointing for a supposedly luxury car in this price range
To drive, this car is nice. Its twin electric motors give it great control and torque, and it feels firm on the road with its 4WD. I've given it 3 months of ownership before writing this review, so I can give more than initial impressions. My previous car was an 2020 Audi Q5.
However, there praise ends. his car is dumb! After driving the Q5, I miss so many features, some more important than others. The automatic windscreen wipers on the Q5 were a convenience, but missing here. Things like self-parking are a really great feature which you expect in today's luxury cars. The (2020) Audi had it, the (2023) Volvo doesn't. Likewise, the Q5 turned on the appropriate camera view when needed. Shift into reverse? The rear camera switched on. Do some manouvering in a tight space? Overhead camera on. Getting close to the car in front, front camera. In the Volvo ... well, it just switched on whichever view was last used. You have to take your attention off what you're doing to operate the very fiddly controls to switch view. Some things I'm still yet to work out, like zooming in and out on the driver display map. Maybe it's not even possible. I tried looking in the manual, but ...
The manual. Ah yes. I was told it came with a manual. It doesn't. The printed material you get is confined to a small booklet containing what Volvo considers to be of interest. I'm sure that if I want to know the price of rice in Peru, or the distance to the innermost moon of Saturn, the information is probably somewhere in there. But information I actually need? You'd be lucky.
To read the full "manual", you have to sit in the car and operate the screen on the centre console. So comfortable and easy! Organised in an intuitive and orderly way? Again, you'd be lucky. You have to try to guess what section Volvo might put a particular piece of wisdom in, and then back out and forge a new trail down the menu tree when you (usually) get it wrong. Sometimes it has taken me over 15 minutes sitting in the car, operating the touch screen with my left hand, to find even the section I want. At other times, I just give up.
Yes, there is a "search" function, such as it is. You have to guess what Volvo decides to call things, and I doubt they have ever met an Australian, let alone hired one, because the "English" they use has never been spoken on this side of the equator. So you have to laboriously operate the onscreen keyboard, in a sort of Q and A game until you find the right keyword.
After 3 months, I'm confined to using the bare essentials of this car because I can't find out more. Even when we took delivery, the salesman had to go off and ask the service department how to pair the key with the car.
There is one manual. For all models. For all countries. Words that occur repeatedly throughout include "this feature does not apply in all markets" or "this feature is only in some models", or "this feature is not available in all languages". Without giving any clue which markets or which models or which languages apply. Even though it's electronic, it seems to be too much work for them to just issue a manual for this model in this country.
There's more, but I'm at 600 words, so I'll leave it there. Don't buy this car, or any other Volvo. Spare yourself the frustration.
Oh, one small addition. Do take the time to read their privacy, all 80-something pages of fine print. Amongst the gems is the news that if you exceed the speed limit, the car will report you to the police. Yes. Seriously.
