Unsafe and Unpredictable: My Volvo EX90 Experience

I applaud his efforts to document this what must’ve been a nightmare of a case for him. But it felt like a lot of the wording is speculative or hyperbolic in nature and aggressively tries to paint Volvo in a bad light. For example:

“Analysis of Volvo's Final Response: This response … confirms Volvo's complete abandonment of customer responsibility…This is Volvo's definition of ‘customer care’ in 2025.”

“Center Display Failure - Critical Interface Blackout: Main Controls Inaccessible”

“Climate Control Malfunction - Climate System Override: Controls Unresponsive Despite Interface Status”

“Complete Center Screen Malfunction - Total System Breakdown: Hard Reset Failed to Restore Screen”

I know little about Volvo or this case; I’m choosing to offer them some benefits of doubt. Comms and decision making are prone to break down on the corporate ladder. Volvo had no doubt fumbled his case badly but I’m not convinced it is indicative of the company’s overall customer support policy. Sure, the main touchscreen had failed. But how is this an “override” of HVAC or a “total system breakdown”? And what’s the “system” anyways? On top of all that, these subtitle summaries smell like AI.

I don’t deny that Volvo has a lot to answer for. Though the choice of these instigating descriptions might not be the best one giving the author is actively pursuing litigation.

Agree 100% the website is very well layed out. The information is presented in very readable format. After a single scroll I was able to fully understand the issues and conclude that the guy has a valid case. Too bad for Volvo for having a horrible customer support

I was genuinely thinking about buying a Volvo car today. This blog changed my mind now.

It seem they are the exact opposite of what I thought.

I love that you made a website to spread the word. Well done. Screw those guys.

Hey Volvo, I’ll now never buy a Volvo. I always thought they were meant to be safe?

> .... if you want reliable quality.

I'm saying this as a German, i strongly reject those accusations. Do not buy from VW group (and not from PSA/Stellantis (Citroen, Fiat, Opel etc brands), either).

I rented an Audi Q7 for a week recently. The drive quality of the car is excellent. But the software is terrible. Just getting CarPlay to work every time is a challenge. I will not be buying an Audi any time soon.

As more and more of the vehicle's experience becomes software controlled, manufacturers who don't have good software development teams are going to lose out. German companies don't seem to understand the growing importance of software, and they are happy to collectively develop the software [1] as opposed to seeing software as a key differentiator.

[1] https://www.electrive.com/2025/06/25/automotive-industry-lau...

Not even, BYD and other Chinese car companies make great, reliable cars. This is simply Volvo intentionally and likely knowingly cheating out as much as possible to make a quick buck, burning their brand in the process

Aren’t Japanese cars the gold standard of reliability? Or has something changed?

I was going to create a website just like this but for my Audi Q5. Least reliable car I ever owned. It’s been in the shop about 15 times in 2 years. I finally gave up. It still has a few unsolved issues but I just don’t care. I’ll be trading it in later this year and … Never another Audi again.

> Buy German cars

Take this with a grain of salt (since it's not first hand experience), but I have heard from friends that the quality of German cars has degraded significantly

> Buy German cars, specifically within the Volkswagen auto group (Audi, VW, Skoda etc) if you want reliable quality.

German cars, as a rule, are made with complete disregard for the people who will have to work on them. They are reliable while meticulously maintained and before anything even remotely important break. Then they become a nightmare.

I don’t own one, but Volvo certainly still stands for safety. The XC90 (the non-fully electric version of this car) had the most amazing safety record in the UK I’ve ever heard of. For the first 10 years or so it was in service no driver or passenger was killed in an XC90 in any accident in the UK.

Well if you don't replace the car you save 150K. But you lose a few million, let's say.

Those few million are invisible, the 150K you see right now and you know, for sure, you're saving it. Incidentally, this is how we got into this quality mess. Cutting quality seems like free money... except that it's not, it's just that nobody bothers to measure the opportunity cost.

And then one day you wake up and you're Chrysler, selling piece of shit vehicles for wayyy more than they're worth. And now your brand is worthless. But, at least you saved a few bucks ;P

They would need to replace all faulty cars after that. They want to avoid that.

> the environmental cost of producing a new electric car is WAY greater than the petrol I’m burning.

The environmental cost of producing an electric car happens once. But driving a car is an ongoing environmental insult. This is an apples/oranges comparison unless you integrate the driving damage over time.

This analysis suggests EVs are overall a win for the environment after 5 years of ownership, assuming your electricity comes from coal. If it comes from hydro or renewable sources, it's more like one year.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d...

It doesn't take much driving for a new EV to balance out the environmental cost of harvesting, shipping, pumping, and burning all that petrol. As I understand it, about 20k km or 15k miles, on average.

> I also still get to feel smug because the environmental cost of producing a new electric car is WAY greater than the petrol I’m burning.

Citation very much needed.

Electric cars are still cars, and therefore terrible for the environment, but they do emit significantly less pollution over their lives and require a lot less oil to operate.

Yes, anecdata from me as well, but the larger issue seems to be cars that run critical functions through the media or entertainment system only. My neighbor had a hybrid Volvo that was towed to the dealership multiple times because the car wouldn’t start when the media center froze. It was always fixed for free but ultimately they decided to sell it as it wasn’t worth the hassle.

This is just a silly statement. Your 2007, 2016, and 2016 vehicles were all new cars in 2007, 2016, and 2016.

There are plenty of 2020-era cars that are, so far, remarkably reliable and cheap to maintain and repair. It's simply that Volvo and Polestar are quite bad at making vehicles.

> New cars are a fool’s game for most people, imho.

I’d have agreed with you in the past, but I just bought a new car for the first time. I wanted a compact pickup - there were basically none produced for a decade from 2012-2022 - the ones from before this gap are questionable safety-wise, and now either are falling apart from rust, or going for a hefty premium because there aren’t many enthusiast-maintained rust-free models for sale. The post 2022 ones for sale just don’t have enough of a discount off new models to be worth buying unless.

I'm pretty excited about the Slate, bezo's car startup. No built in UI, bring your own device, including screens and sound. Potentially avoids all the overstuffed software issues in modern vehicles

The Cayman you mention has a resistive touchscreen, but to your point, everything that needs a physical control has a physical control.

These were global-maximum designs, it's all downhill from here.

Volvo hasn’t been a reliable brand since ~2000 when it was sold to Ford. Even less reliable when it was sold to Geely.

They’ve essentially skated by on brand recognition earned decades ago.

I was so excited to get my S60 PHEV. Mechanically it is an amazing machine, great handling, great power, I rarely have to put gas in it. BUT. It is a nightmare with the technology.

Like most new cars, everything is tied into the center display/computer. It will crash while driving, which will remove all sound from your car, and I don't mean just the radio/spotify/whatever. You can be in mid-turn with your turn signal on and then just absolute quiet. It is so off-putting. Your blinker stops, you can't really tell your engine is on, and every screen just goes black. Thankfully I don't have a pure electric, so I my car still physically moves, but I really can't believe I haven't gotten in an accident when my screen crashes.

Thankfully I leased this vehicle, and I'm almost done with it, I honestly can't wait to turn it in.

That's a Chinese car maker for you.

One of my cars is a 2011 Volvo XC90 with ~250K miles on it and I plan to drive into the ground. It's definitely the tail end of that sweet spot and it's quite surprising that it's (technologically) as simple as it is. It has a basic AWD system and only a simple cruise control system but it's the perfect feature set and I use it 80% of the time I'm driving. (I've driven late model rentals which have "smart cruise control" systems and find their "corrections" very unnerving.) For A/V, it doesn't have a backup camera (admittedly kind of a bummer), any LCD screens or touch screens and it doesn't even have Bluetooth for auxiliary audio input. The keys and fobs are about the only aspect of it that I'd say are over-complicated, as it's never had a working fob since I've owned it and getting one is prohibitively expensive ($500+).

That all being said, it's (probably?) not spying on me and isn't likely to do anything unexpected and weird on the highway like the post mentions. I can also totally work on it myself or get my local mechanic to. Although, unsurprisingly, parts are hard to find and more expensive than they are for my Honda.

I've taken it into the Volvo dealership for service on a few occasions and they legitimately laugh at me. ("How many miles are you looking to put on this thing?") I trust their technicians and am willing to pay for certain jobs and diagnoses (probably their most valuable offering) but their service and salespeople look down their noses at me and it's unpleasant. As others have said, Volvo was absolutely a great car company in the past but it doesn't seem to one anymore. Despite how much I like my car, I can't imagine buying one of their modern, tech-centric models -- in part because of posts like this one.

In ~2005 I worked with a world-renowned expert on industrial automation and computer control of machines. He drove a 1989 Mercedes 300 sedan with a manual transmission, which he claimed was the last car made with no software in it at all. These two facts are not un-related.

Yes (and tip of the hat to my fellow 00s Saab owners!)

meh, not for all brands. current BMWs are light years more reliable than 2000-2010 models

When I saw the price, I thought it was a typo. Volvos aren't the cheapest cars but they're not six figure cars either.

The base price (USD) is 81K - after clicking on every single option, I managed to bump it to 105K.

Canada doesn't have specific "lemon laws" like the US - instead, consumers must rely on provincial consumer protection acts, manufacturer warranties, or the Canadian Motor Vehicle Arbitration Plan (CAMVAP) for resolving persistent vehicle defects.

No, Quebec does but other provinces just rely on standard consumer protection laws. At least the last time I looked into it.

I think some provinces have some additional vehicle-specific laws, but no comprehensive "lemon law" as such.

I was recently shopping for a new car and looked at Volvo. We've had a Model Y for a few years now and when the Volvo salesperson proudly showed us how the truck height could be set by holding the button, I asked "is that a global setting or does it remember where it is when you set the height?"

The salesperson looked at me like I was crazy and confirmed it was global (the Y remembers what the proper height is at various locations using the GPS). It's frustrating to me that Teslas have fit and finish issues (though they get better) and there are some parts of it that I think are made cheaply (paint for example), but the software on the Tesla is miles ahead of anything else.

Tesla software in theory was generally pretty class leading. Certainly some downsides with their homegrown infotainment vs a car with Carplay/Android Auto though.

What I did not enjoy when I was one was the number of functions that are buttonless and require touchscreen UI. Additionally every 1-2 years they'd do a major version upgrade that moved said functions somewhere around the screen, sometimes into a sub-menu.

So I couldn't do stuff by touch without looking, and they'd periodically break my quick glance muscle memory with releases. Stuff like - adjust air vents, adjust wiper settings, front/rear defrost.

VW software is a monstrosity from everything I've heard.

BMW has struck a decent balance of features, reliability, and having BUTTONS. I also have a HUD in mine and it's nice having instrument cluster display plus HUD to avoid really having to look away from the road at all. The number of cars that require glancing at the central touchscreen for lots of stuff is nuts, and a fad I hope fades away.

I'll never buy anything other than Tesla (mainly for FSD) but some of the software can use some work. Apple Music sometimes can't connect, it saturates your internet uploading telemetry if you let it, and probably the worst thing is that the maps don't cache. Kind of awkward to have a robust off-roading vehicle with unusable maps when you actually go off-roading.

Software-wise, there is not. Their software is years ahead of the industry in pretty-much all dimensions.

Rivian is the closest next-best option, but loads of people have complained about bugs in their software.

I'd guess Rivian SW is good, because Volkswagen's SW got so bad they hired Rivian to rewrite it for them. (That contract is the only thing keeping Rivian afloat right now.)

I don't know if I can ever buy a non-Tesla car again (unless its a truck).

I'll check out Rivian next time though, as those look pretty damn good. Like you, I don't know of any other brands that are competitive enough for me. I want to like other car UX's but once you have a smooth UX its hard to go back to sluggish ones.

The Rivian is nice in terms of software. Although it also doesn't support CarPlay just like the Tesla.

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