Owning a Volvo EX30: My notes

Introduction

These are random notes I’m continuously taking as I own a Volvo EX30 (single motor, normal range) in Sweden. The main purpose of this post, like many others in this blog, is to remind myself of things in the future.

And just to have this said: I absolutely love this car. That means accepting its small and silly flaws, in particular all kinds of things that are off with the Android interface. It just so happens that everything that I find important about a car, in particular driving it gracefully and with full control, is so excellent. Every single time I drive it, I somehow find myself saying “What a car” to myself.

Depending on fast charging

But this goes out to anyone thinking about buying a car without having a regular place to charge it: Don’t. It’s a nightmare. Commercial airlines plan the amount of fuel they have at take-off in order to have enough to reach their destination, without carrying too much fuel, which is dead weight that costs money. By the same principle, I currently don’t have a charging point at home, and I find myself calculating the amount of charge needed to reach my required destinations and planning when I’m going to charge the car. And it gets much worse during a Swedish winter, as heating significantly increases battery consumption, and then “fast” charging is really slow unless you’ve been driving for 45 minutes or so.

So the strategy with fast charging is reversed: I used to take my old car for a refuel as part of doing other errands (shopping for groceries in particular), but fast charging is best done after a longer trip. So the best timing is on the way home after being somewhere distant, or after driving to a distant place. That’s usually not the most convenient timing, because one usually just wants home or to that place one was driving to. But in particular during winter, one can get a decent amount of charge in 15-20 minutes instead of a much longer session.

Or alternatively, make sure to have something useful to do for 45-60 minutes in the car, allowing the much slower pace.

Of course, with a regular place to charge, one can keep the level at 80% or so all the time, and not worry about this for everyday activity.

Temperature is everything

It took me quite some time to understand the thing with fast (DC) charging. The simple rule is that the battery needs to be quite warm to charge fast (90 kW or so). And sometimes, it turns out that the charging point doesn’t give enough energy. So it’s somehow confusing. It also took me time to understand why the Android app always suggests charging stations far away: These are the ones that will give some real energy once the car has had enough time to warm up the battery.

But the most important thing I needed to realize is that on a cold winter, it takes 40 minutes for the battery to warm up enough for 50 kW. And those 40 minutes are divided between preconditioning and the actual charging. So if the charging station is 10 minutes from home, it will take 30 minutes until the charging speed slowly goes up to this level.

One could hope for a feature on the app to start warming up the battery while the car is still parked, something along the lines of “I will start fast charging at 13:00 and get into the car 12:50”. Which is quite a common scenario when you live in a city. Like, OK, it will waste some electricity on warming up the battery, but this way I’ll get a nice boost in 20 minutes, possibly before going grocery shopping.

Another important point is that slow charging is a good way to precondition the battery. So having the car charge at one of those slow charging stations in a mall is a good way to start warming up, and then drive to a fast charging station. These are the tricks one needs to think about on a snowy day without a regular place to charge.

That said, sometimes the charging station just isn’t up to the promised rate, just because. So even when all conditions are in place for 90 kW charging, and one had that the previous time, suddenly one gets half. Why? Go figure.

A few real-life examples:

• With 4 degrees (Celsius, of course) outside, and a drive of 25 minutes (Stockholm to OKQ8 Glädjen) I got 50 kW right away, going up to 90 kW after just 10 minutes.
• On a 10 degrees day, 20 minutes of conditioning brings the rate to 40 kW, goes up to 56 kW after a few minutes charging. So definitely charge slowly as preconditioning.
• On a warm day, with good preconditioning and 33% I got 113 kW for a beginning.
• On a 27 degrees day, I got 100 kW from the beginning (at 30%) after 10 minutes’ preconditioning.
• On a 16 degrees day, after driving 40 minutes to the station, it started off at 116 kW (from 27%).

Software updates

Every now and then, the car will announce it’s ready to install an OTA software update. As with any software update, things can mess up afterwards, so approve this only when the next trip is of a relaxed form. In other words, when it’s OK to stop a few times on the way to fix small mishaps.

The September 2026 update to version 2.1.2 was particularly rough: I had to repair my smartphone over Bluetooth, and one-pedal drive was suddenly switched off. This is somewhat annoying, of course, but only slightly so if this happens on that relaxed trip, and if you expect these things to happen. Which you should, if you own an EX30. Sometimes I think someone in Volvo says “We’ll release this version with this nonsense, or else people won’t have enough reason to buy the more expensive models”.

But this update was the first time something really negative happened:  I failed to activate Pilot Assist. Neither pushing the right lever nor using the steering wheel buttons helped. This was easy to fix by going to the car’s driving settings, and change Pilot Assist to speed limit, and then back to Pilot Assist. And voilà, it worked just as before. But — this issue came back randomly, so this required to check if Pilot Assist works on the beginning of each drive. This is a crucial function when you live in Sweden and speed limits are taken seriously. And this isn’t yet another little woopsie in the app, as this about driving the car. I don’t care about silly bugs everywhere, as long as they don’t affect the actual driving of the car, in this mishap did exactly that.

I have a category in this blog about not updating software, and this blog just joined it.

Lesson learned: Even with Volvo, postpone the update as long as possible, so that others hit the bugs and find out how to solve them before I update too.

Other random issues

• After switching to summer wheels in Kungsängen, I got an error about TPMS not working. This warning appeared only around Rotebro. I drove back to Kungsängen, and the warning remained. But then I drove back, and after a few km the error vanished.
• Reboot Android: Press and hold the volume-down and cruise-speed-down buttons for a few seconds.
• TCAM reset (Internet connection): Press and hold the SOS button for 30 seconds. I tried this once after failing to start remote climate control from the mobile app; I’m not sure whether it helped.