It took a while, thanks to that perfidious leasing company we used a couple of years ago, but we finally traded in the Mini (genuinely sad trombone) and picked up the new car: a fully electric Volvo EX30.
Yes, we’ve gone back to the big Swedish box, although, technically, it’s now a Chinese box with Swedish characteristics. We collected it on Monday evening and took it for a drive over to Teneriffe for some chicken and beer at Zero Fox. That was partly to avoid doing our first trip in the thick of peak hour, but mostly because the chicken and beer are really good.
The next day I did a fair bit more driving. My mother lost power in the big storm over the weekend, so her freezer needed cleaning out and I had to restock her groceries before her delivery arrived the following day. It was a good excuse to get behind the wheel, although the weather was hot garbage, proper horizontal tropical rainbombs.
I dunno whether it was the wild driving conditions or simply the awareness of being responsible for this very shiny, very expensive new vehicle, but it was a hair-raising intro.
It wasn’t my first time in an electric vehicle. Some OG readers might recall that about ten years ago I reviewed the Chevy Volt for Wheels magazine, so I was already familiar with the eerie quiet and the surprisingly fast take-off speeds. Things have only become quieter and faster.
The sensor suites have evolved, too. Even in violent tropical storms, when visibility barely extends beyond the headlights, the giant tablet in the center console now displays a ghostly radar image of all the vehicles around you. It’s a bit like flying by instruments, if one were foolish enough to try that.
I stuck with the Mark I eyeball, even though mine aren’t what they used to be. Visibility was appalling, but still — it was a joy to drive. And I mean that literally: it gave me joy. So much so that Jane very cruelly (if accurately) mocked my new crush.
The Mini was a great little car, but by the time we traded it in, it’d done 110,000 kilometres and was starting to show its age. Under tough conditions, or driving up the hill to our place, you could feel it straining. The new Volvo just eats up the road.
Sure, any new car would, petrol or electric, but it’s still strange to go from coaxing an old mate along to suddenly commanding something that feels like it just launched out of the shuttle bay on the Enterprise at Warp 2.
I’m not a car reviewer anymore, so I’ll skip the rundown. Bottom line, it’s very comfortable, very nice, and drives like a dream. It’s packed with sci-fi sensors from the future. The weirdest one is the camera system, which gives you a kind of third-person, God’s-eye view of the car while parking.
The biggest change, for me at least, is not having to think about petrol. Or, more importantly, not having to pay for petrol. I caught myself grinning like a fiend as I drove past one servo after another, seeing prices north of $2 a litre and thinking cruelly, Go up. Go up. That was bad of me. I feel bad about myself.
We didn’t bother installing a fast charger at home, because after a little research, I learned the batteries prefer to sip, not gulp. They’re happiest when drip-feeding electrons through a regular household socket. So far, I’ve found that an hour to an hour and a half of city driving is easily replenished while the car’s parked at home for the rest of the day.
I have thought about range anxiety, but honestly, there isn’t much to be anxious about. Almost every drive I do is on the same set of roads at the same time, and the car barely falls out of the 80-90% charge range.
We’re heading to the coast this weekend, the round trip will probably drop the battery from about 95% to maybe 75%; so, plenty left in reserve.
Out of curiosity, I downloaded a couple of apps—including A Better Routeplanner—to see what a Brisbane-to-Sydney run would look like. Even though I only make that drive once every few years, it turns out it’s not much different from doing it in a petrol car.
I’ve done the round trip twice in the past twelve months, which is a lot for me. Both times it took about fifteen or sixteen hours, because we stopped a few times along the way - toilet breaks, coffee, stretching the legs. You could theoretically drive straight through in eleven hours with one quick petrol stop, but that would be exhausting and a little fucking dangerous.
Most people already break that trip into three or four sections. In an EV, it’s exactly the same, except instead of spending five minutes at the pump and another twenty at a fast-food counter, you plug in for twenty-five or thirty minutes, and go have that coffee or terrible burger anyway.
The only real adjustment is for mid-length trips, like our regular Brisbane-to-Yamba run. You could do it in one go, arriving with maybe twenty per cent battery left. But given the likelihood of roadworks or traffic jams on the Pacific Highway, you’d probably stop at Tweed Heads or somewhere near Byron to top up. Then again, I’d stop there for a sandwich and coffee regardless, so again, not much difference.
One fun side effect of all this is that I’ve discovered the world of YouTube car nerds. I’d never really paid attention to them before, but it’s a surprisingly entertaining subculture, full of small-to-medium-sized celebrities who know their stuff and seem genuinely invested.
Watch enough of them and you’ll eventually come across what I think of as Avengers Assemble episodes, where a manufacturer — Volvo, in this case — brings them all together for a model launch. Seeing all your favourite reviewers in one place feels oddly like a crossover event in a shared cinematic universe.
It’s not a world I plan to live in, but for now, it’s been a fun way to meet this tribe, and learn more about the strange, silent, future machine now sitting in our driveway, sipping power from the solar panels.