Volvo C30 T5 2007 review

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.