Good. We need more low cost options in the US. We also need more small electric car options. I wish the VW ID.3 and brands like Citoen and Renault were sold here.
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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@alyaza Not sure if it reaches the US market as well, but there's also Dacia Spring at a starting price of $21,850.78 (according to their website). The car is pretty much just branded by them and made in China, but Dacia has been well known for making affordable and quality cars ever since the Renault takeover ๐
And the Renault Zoe is a really great car for cities
I'm a bit conflicted here. As a very happy Volvo driver I recently test-drove the (all-electric) XC40 Recharge and could have a look at the current EX30. The XC40 was very nice to drive, but both cars had a distinctly unfinished feel to it - some features felt like last-minute additions they didn't think quite through, and some advertised features such as Android Auto or 150kW fast charging didn't work at all. When asked for an estimate for full functionality, the sales person basically told me "your guess is as good as mine". Overall my 2011 V60 feels way more solid and polished and has some configuration options that newer Volvos apparently don't have at all.
With the EX30 sorta-kinda being the 'value' car of the Volvo Recharge line, I fear there's an even greater risk of disappointment for many buyers. And I wouldn't want to pay that kind of money to effectively participate in a huge beta test.
Since the MSRP of the Core trim comes in just under $35k, the EX30 is eligible for a much wider array of state and local rebates, even though it's not eligible for federal tax credits.
https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/electric-vehicle-rebates-by-state/
Other mildly interesting details:
- Touchscreen controls for everything. Boo.
- Made in China, but Geely appears to be doing an unusually good job at keeping its manufacturing generally unproblematic. Volvo also independently monitors the material sourcing for their batteries.
- It's very close in size to the VW Golf (EX30: 167x72ร61 inches, Golf: 168x71x58 inches). For our friends across the pond, it is hard to overstate how rare vehicles this small are becoming in the US. Out of the 162 new/refreshed vehicles released in the US 2018-2022 (according to KBB), only 14 or so were this size or smaller -- and that's being generous, I'm including things like the Toyota C-HR.
- Volvo dodged the 27.5% tariffs with a rarely-used bylaw: they export more product from the US to China than vice versa, so they don't have to pay the tariffs on the few things they do import.
Yeah, the touchscreen for everything is trash. And AFAIK in Polestars, the buttons that are not in the touchscreen are capacitive with haptic feedback. Like, why not just make that a button?
I want one. I'm from a Volvo-owning family, but with the discontinuation of their smaller models, I've questioned whether my Volvo-owning days would be over... you know, a decade from now when the smaller models have filtered out of the second hand market. I can see myself getting an EX30 in 5-10 years.