Volvo C30 2008 review

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.