Volvo C30 Reviews

The American company is in crisis, despite last week's George Bush- backed bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, and has already sold its stake in Mazda to clear some cash.

Like criticising Lara Bingle for not being erudite, or knowing what erudite means.But let's do it anyway.The thing about the C30 is that it's not supposed to be like other Volvos - ie staid, shoebox like and slowly steady — and the T5 version I was driving, in particular, was rumoured to be quite the jigger.Sadly the C30 is a 'nice, but...' car — not to be confused with a nice butt car, which it is clearly not. Indeed, it has the rear end from that bug-ugly conveyance seen in Wayne's World.The boot is also a triumph of form, or malform, over function. The big goggle eyed rear window looks unique, but it has reduced the boot to the size of a bootie, and the luggage cover makes it still smaller.Strangely, I was approached in a small country town by people who declared that I was driving `a mighty fine car'. This was because they'd approached it front-on, an angle it does actually look pleasant from.I invited them to have a walk around the back and then watched them hack up their pipe tobacco.Visual violence aside, the T5 had its share of problems in our week together.For a start, the driver's seatbelt seemed to be imitating an Anaconda. It was either looping out of the spool and piling up in my lap, or trying to asphyxiate me.Then there was the brilliant, ingenious Blind Spot Information System, which didn't work. Well, it did, because its tricky radar eyes did spot cars in my blindspot and alert me to them by illuminating a light, but it also started returning false positives.This made me think I as being followed around by a Christine-like ghost car, haunting my blind spot.Then there was the smooth road harmonic resonance at 2300rpm, or, sadly, somewhere between 100 and 110km/h. This vibrant vibration was so powerful it made my speaking voice sound like Stephen Hawking.And yet... And yet I still found myself almost liking the C30 at times, almost on alternate days.This is partly because the interior is quite charming — everyone loved the “floating” dash and the Ikea-style blonde wood panelling.Somehow it also just felt like a nice car to be driving, with a slick little gearbox, reasonably communicative steering and a turbocharged five-cylinder engine good for 162kW and 320Nm.Apparently the vigorous Volvo will even sprint to 100km/h in 6.7 seconds, but somehow it doesn't feel that fast.In short, if you try to drive the C30 in a sporty fashion, it reacts like a woman who's been dragged to a five-day cricket Test match.Sure, it will go, but you're going to be well aware it's not that happy about it.Volvo seems to think its sporty spice car is up against BMW's 1 Series, the VW Golf, Alfa Romeo's 147, Audi's A3 and the Mini Cooper S.Only it's not, because all of those machines are more genuinely sporty and none of those buyers would really cross shop against it.And here we come to the nub of the dilemma. Who would actually buy one?The badge puts off anyone young or cool and Volvo can claim its adding youthful vigour to its brand until the moose come home, it just ain't.So we're left with, perhaps, old women who don't need much space for their shopping. But then they wouldn't have much need for turbocharged engines or lairy wheels, either.Then there's the price, which would tend to scare most people.While the range starts with the C30 S at $34,450, the version I was driving was a simply silly $42,450. You could have a Subaru WRX for that money, although it's unlikely that anyone who would darken the door of a Volvo dealer would consider such an alternative.So, in the end, I'm confused. But not half as confused as the people at Volvo.

The Swede's inline five-cylinder turbo, which is used also in Ford's Focus and Mondeo XR5 models is a quick and capable thing married to the slick six-speed manual.But though the C30 looks more or less Volvo from the B-pillar forward, its glass hatch is a singular and welcome departure from the design norm; albeit one that makes the cargo cover a very necessary option on a list of them that's way long.SnapshotVOLVO C30 T5Price: $43,950 (as tested $49,080)Engine: 2.5-litre/5-cylinder turbo 162kW/320NmTransmission: 6-speed manualEconomy: 8.7L 100kmDo you think this is a worthy Car of the Year finalist?For all the latest on the carsguide Car Of The Year click here

Nobody has ever argued successfully that the lads and lasses at Volvo have spent the long watches of their winter darkness being anything but serious.

We have experienced the responsive S40/V50 and practical XC90 four-wheel drive.

Volvo's C30 is driven as much by marketing as by the person behind the wheel. In fact, there's absolutely no point to this car except whatever's Swedish for "vive la difference".The lumpen need not apply. Nor, as even Volvo says, need its "traditional" buyers. For the C30 is all about funk over function.If you're seduced by the look of this singular three-door coupe, you'll care not the price of a latte that the hot petrol version is a Ford Focus XR5 in designer disguise and that the decaf iteration might as well be a Mazda 3.Platform-sharing is one thing; the face you show to the world is quite another.The C30's an indulgence for DINKS — the car they might savour at the time of life that comes before, or after, the sort of family additions that make Volvo's more usual lines so depressingly germane.What's beyond demographic discussion is that the C30 is a car to turn heads. Or at least half of it is.The largely glass rear lift door is intended to coolly recall Volvo's semi-legendary P1800ES — a piece of late-1960s futurism.As departures from the norm go, the only remotely comparable thing of the moment is Citroen's so-seldom-seen-as-to-be-almost-mythical C4 VTS coupe.A glimpse of the C30's pert rear three-quarters would induce a smile from even a chronic melancholic.Which is why, when it's filling your rear-view mirror, the C30 is also startlingly conventional. Front on, it could be a comparatively common-or-garden S40, the sedan with which it shares almost all its underpinnings.It's as though the river of Volvo's inspiration ran dry at the B-pillar.So it was with something like relief that we discovered during a drive route that took us from the Sunshine State into our State of Disrepair and back, that the C30's top T5 variant is in no sense a half-arsed effort.In bare performance terms — zero to 100km/h in a dashed competitive 6.7 seconds is claimed for the manual — the T5 is towards the top of the FWD blown hatch posse.A sub-1350kg kerb weight demands less than an S40 or V50 of the 2.5-litre, five-cylinder turbo petrol engine, which is at its best driven through the buttery six-speed manual.If the C30's tautly tuned suspension can make for vicious bump-stop impacts on irregular surfaces, this is surely a fair trade for an intense and almost Focussed drive.It's futile to continue lamenting that modern malaise of over-assisted steering, so we won't.Unlike it's all-paw sedan and wagon relations, the C30 T5 is a front-driver (though an AWD V6 seems almost certain at some point), its aim-and-fire ability best exploited on sweeping, rather than desperately tight, bends.With grunt delivery so linear and the manual transmission so tactile, it's quite pathetic that the vast majority will opt for the much less satisfying five-speed auto. Bah and humbug ...If the C30's rear view guarantees more than a passing glance, there are — or will be later in the year — something like a colour palette from which to choose, another near-first from this chromatically dreary marque.These colours are louder than the engine and exhaust note, which are so polite as to be barely present.This holds true for the LE version with its 2.4 atmo five. Or so we're told.We'll explore this version when one becomes available, while we wait for the D5 diesel line. The latter is due in the second half of the year, along with an entry-level $34,450 S version.The T5 stops less emphatically than it goes, though. You'd trade some of the feel in the long-travel brake pedal of the first manual version we tried for a bit more bite. Left-foot braking in the auto felt more satisfactory.No matter the veneer, Volvo's accident avoidance and impact measures are never going to be a concern.Although a good bit shorter in the body than the S40 T5, and 179kg lighter, the C30 is as safe as a house without so closely resembling one.Given it was conceived as an empty-nester's mobile, rear passengers have reasonable accommodation by a two-plus-two measure. It's a question of carrying friends or luggage, though, not both.One of the few options for the generously specced T5 will be a removable hardtop to go inside the see-through back door. Until it becomes available, buyers will have to shield their Vuitton and Burberry bling in a soft coverlet.Possibly a practicality of this sort won't much bother them, a C30 being very much about being seen.