291–300 of 436 posts
Volvo sadly no longer stands for Swedish quality and safety. What you’re buying is essentially an overpriced Chinese car with Volvo stickers. And I’m saying this as a Swede. Buy German cars, specifically within the Volkswagen auto group (Audi, VW, Skoda etc) if you want reliable quality.
Aren’t Japanese cars the gold standard of reliability? Or has something changed?
New cars are a fool’s game for most people, imho. Unless you just insist on having the newest thing, they rarely make sense. Couple that with the relentless electronic gadgetry and phone-home surveillance and I may never own a car produced after ~2020. Our current stable: 2007 Mazdaspeed 3, just keeps going. All buttons, no screens. 2016 Porsche Cayman, one small multifunction screen, display only, no touch. Buttons…
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.
Insane that Volvo doesn't just replace the car. The cost is trivial compared to the brand damage here. The complaint is so well documented and the customer is not being a jerk at all; not sure what Volvo's logic is.
They would need to replace all faulty cars after that. They want to avoid that.
- Fight Club
New cars are a fool’s game for most people, imho. Unless you just insist on having the newest thing, they rarely make sense. Couple that with the relentless electronic gadgetry and phone-home surveillance and I may never own a car produced after ~2020. Our current stable: 2007 Mazdaspeed 3, just keeps going. All buttons, no screens. 2016 Porsche Cayman, one small multifunction screen, display only, no touch. Buttons…
These were global-maximum designs, it's all downhill from here.
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The two main Achilles Heels of Hyundai/Kia are their ICE Engines and their EV ICCUs. Google reliability for both and proceed accordingly. They're good about replacing/fixing both issues when they come up, and normally have extended warranties, but they are critical components too and long lead times to fix. Outside of those issues, which don't happen on all vehicles, I view the brand as pretty rock solid. I'm impress…
I recently got rid of a 2016 Kia Sonata with a severe (and getting worse) oil burning issue. It was well under 100k miles. We really liked the car otherwise overall. Great price, seemed to be made well, easy to work on. The extended warranty on these only applies if you actually blow up engine, which I wasn't willing to do deliberately because I have scruples. (And according to forum threads, at the time this happene…
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This is compounded by the fact that EV tech is rapidly improving, fueling depreciation. It's like personal computers in the 90's/00's. Compare to gas cars which is a very mature technology, and really only perks and features get updated.
Are they rapidly improving though? Sure, other companies are making an effort to catch up with Tesla on autonomous driving, but range/speed/price are largely stagnant. Mostly, it looks like every company (in the US/EU)is in shambles releasing half baked EVs hoping no one will notice that their hardware company is terrible at software.
The development of autonomous driving has hit diminishing returns, and while "mostly reliable" is OK for a Taxi fleet with expensive experts on call 24/7, I do not want the deadly half-arsed crap from Tesla.
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Are they rapidly improving though? Sure, other companies are making an effort to catch up with Tesla on autonomous driving, but range/speed/price are largely stagnant. Mostly, it looks like every company (in the US/EU)is in shambles releasing half baked EVs hoping no one will notice that their hardware company is terrible at software.
The combination of range, (charging) speed, and price have all greatly improved since 2020. The next five years look promising too, with solid state batteries and smaller/lighter motors set to hit the market.
The best cars were built between 2000 and 2010. Pretty much the pinnacle of the internal combustion engine without all the millions of lines of buggy code that apparently no longer allow you to open your car freely.
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.
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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 Displa…
Eh the author is coming from a place of emotion (considering the effort put into the website) so I would definitely cut them some slack on the fairness of their reporting. The owner is telling their story, not a journalist. > But how is this an “override” of HVAC or a “total system breakdown”? Complete failure of the throttle would fall within total system breakdown to me. > Comms and decision making are prone to bre…
Recently test drove a used EX90 PHEV. I was shocked at how rough the transition from electric to ICE was. The owner said he never drove it in all-electric mode, just in hybrid mode (so the ICE is on all the time). We liked other aspects of the vehicle, but once we saw the vehicle history from the dealer, we knew it'd be thousands of dollars every year or two for repairs.
The EX90 is a new all-electric BEV released for the 2025 model year. Perhaps you drove an XC90 plug-in hybrid?