Volvo moves one market niche smaller to bring in younger, climate-conscious buyers
Volvo is aiming for a change of gear on its path towards electrification with this week’s road test subject. The EX30 is a small car that, it’s hoped, can have a big impact on Gothenburg’s sales mix. Its maker is already aiming for half of its global sales to be of all-electric models by 2025, and to be selling BEVs exclusively by 2030. In order to hit those marks, however, Volvo needs affordable electric models like this – but, moreover, it needs people to buy them in greater numbers than they are currently.
You wonder, in fact, if and when brands like Volvo might start rolling back on – or, at least, tempering slightly – ambitious electrification claims like these. The penetration of EVs, in many western markets including the UK, is stuck at between 15% and 25%, and not for the want of an increasing number of more affordable all-electric options.
So the commercial challenge facing this car looks significant. For the next couple of thousand words, however, we will concern ourselves with whether the Volvo EX30 is the kind of electric car that deserves to drive adoption, and ultimately to succeed, in the first place.
It is the first of a new breed of Volvos for more reasons than one: not just because it is the smallest in decades (since the Volvo-DAF 300 series of the 1970s, in fact), nor because it is the first Volvo designed exclusively for electric power (not counting the XC40-derived C40 crossover-coupé), but also because it’s based on an all-new platform developed fully in the firm’s current, Geely-controlled corporate era.
Buyers of this car will be Volvo’s very youngest, claims the company, and three out of four will never have considered a Volvo before.
DESIGN AND ENGINEERING
Volvo has certainly gone small with this car by its own standards, without defying compact EV class norms. The EX30, as its model nomenclature suggests, is an all-electric compact SUV. It’s more than 200mm shorter than Gothenburg’s next-smallest model, and shorter at the kerb also than either the Ford Focus-based C30 (of 2006) or the 480 (of 1986) hatchbacks were, although it has a five-door hatchback body. Relative to its modern rivals, however, it’s not all that small (a Jeep Avenger is almost 200mm shorter).
For now, it is
