Category: Technology

Volvo’s EX30 crossover has yet to arrive, but it’s already generated a lot of interest thanks to a killer combination of a charming design and low starting price of $35,000. On top of that, it’s eco-friendly to the core due to its low carbon manufacturing footprint and use of sustainable materials.

There is a “but,” though. All models sold globally to start with, including in the US, will be built in China by Volvo parent Geely. That’s controversial given current geopolitical tensions and it means the EX30 won’t be eligible for federal US tax credits. However, Volvo recently announced that it would build some models in its Ghent, Belgium plant in Europe starting in 2025 to “boost… production capacity for the expected EX30 demand in Europe as well as for global export.”

We’ve finally been able to drive the EX30 in Barcelona and answer a lot of lingering questions. How’s the handling, acceleration and range? We know it’s fairly small, so is there enough interior space for the US market? And how does it stack up against the competition, especially Tesla, considering the lack of tax credits? Let’s dive in and learn more.

Features

We looked at the EX30 when it first launched, examining the controls, infotainment system, storage and more, so check that out if you haven’t. Still, I’ll revisit some highlights here before the drive. 

There are two versions of the EX30, the single-motor Extended Range and the twin-motor Performance model, starting at $34,950 and $44,900 respectively (before the $1,195 destination fee). They’re built on parent Geely’s 400 volt SEA platform, shared by some upcoming Polestar models.

The Extended Range version makes a decent 268 horsepower with 258 pound feet of torque, while the Performance model ups that to a wilder 422 horsepower and 400 pound feet. Both feature 69 kWh batteries, with 64 kWh usable, for an estimated EPA range of 275 and 265 miles respectively (the final figures should be available soon). There’s a 51kWh battery too, but it’s only available in Europe. The maximum charging rate is 153kW, bringing the battery from 10-80 percent in 26.5 minutes.

Starting in 2025, the 2026 model year EX30 will be equipped with a NACS (North American Charging Standard) port thanks to its recent agreement with Volvo. That means the 2025 model debuting in 2024 will effectively be a unicorn, as it will carry a CCS port instead — though a NACS adapter will be included for Tesla Superchargers, of course. 

The base models are, well, basic, with things like parking sensors and a digital key left out. We tested both with the “Ultra” equipment level, which includes the Harman Kardon sound system, larger wheels, USB-C outlets, power front seats, park assist pilot and more. Those cost $40,600 and $46,600, respectively.

The EX30 is a looker, with balanced proportions and smooth lines. The design says “friendly” and “accessible” rather than “aggressive,” and it caught a few admiring looks from passersby.

From the outside, the EX30 looks larger than it is, but the 167-inch wheelbase is similar to a Mini Clubman or VW Golf GTI hatch – not large vehicles by any means. It weighs 3,850 pounds, about the same as a Kia Niro EV. All told, it’s Volvo’s smallest SUV by a good margin.

That’s not an issue up front, as the EX30 is relatively wide and has ample headroom for tall drivers. The backseat is a bit cramped, though, especially with tall occupants up front. The rear cargo area can accommodate a decent amount of stuff, and you can make it a bit larger by removing the floor-leveling door. It can be further expanded by folding down the front seats.

Rather than putting speakers in the doors, Volvo simply used a soundbar-like system built by Harman Kardon. That’s smart, as it should appeal to younger users in Volvo’s target market. With EX30-specific tuning, it sounds really good too.

The interior isn’t as basic as the Model 3, as there are switches and stalks for drive mode, turn signals, lights, volume and other primary functions. The interior is also less sterile thanks to Volvo’s creative use of sustainable materials and color schemes. Everything is soft and welcoming, with a variety of textures and patterns, made from things like old denim and recycled PVC window frames.

Like the Model 3, though, the EX30 has no dashboard, just a center touchscreen, so important information like speed and charge level is off to the side. Volvo says that it helps you refocus on driving, somehow, but I’m not a fan – it forced me to take my eyes off the road more than I’d like.

All other things are handled by the 12.3-inch center touchscreen. The main display shows key functions like speed, moving map, charge, drive mode and more. Other settings let you change things like the steering firmness, or get maximum boost in the Performance model by choosing all-wheel drive – if you don’t mind a significant hit to range. The on or off one-pedal control isn’t as precise as I’d like, as it lacks multiple braking levels like Kia’s EV6 and other models.

Driving

Now that we know the EX30, what’s it like to drive? In short, it’s a Volvo. That’s not a bad thing – what it lacks in agility, it makes up in comfort. It floats over tattered freeway pavement with little jolting and you’ll barely notice potholes or small speed bumps. It’s a nice car to drive in the city or take on cross-country trips, but it’d flounder on a track.

That’s not an accident; Volvo specifically tuned in a fair amount of suspension travel to favor comfort over sport. Tesla went the other way with the Model 3, so it can nip around corners more precisely, but rides harshly on less-than-smooth roads.

In terms of power and torque, the Extended Range model has enough for most drivers. With a 5.1 second 0-60 MPH time, overtaking is safe and easy at freeway speeds and acceleration is crisp and predictable in all conditions. With that model, the power pairs well with the suspension, striking a nice balance between comfort and control.

The Performance version is on another level, though. With 422 horsepower and 400 pounds of torque in an EV of this size and weight, acceleration is hair-raising. In fact, it can go from 0-60 MPH in just 3.4 seconds, quicker than any Volvo to date and close to the Model 3 Performance. On tight winding roads with short passing zones, I felt confident enough to zip around trucks or buses. Freeway speed limits arrive almost too quickly, though the EX30 is limited to 180 km/h, or about 112 MPH.

Despite the power, it’s no race car. The suspension is identical to the Extended Range model, which is to say, too soft for high-speed cornering. Just stomping on the pedal from a start can create some drama, as it becomes clear that the suspension isn’t quite up to that level of instant torque. So, apart from the raw horsepower, it’s not an enthusiast car.

The EX30’s Pilot Assist is reasonably advanced for a relatively inexpensive EV, offering more than just lane-keeping and collision avoidance. As on other Volvo cars, it can also change lanes automatically, make passing easier and adjust your speed to traffic. It also offers a Park Pilot Assist function that can locate spots at speeds up to 14 MPH and then park automatically. The system worked as well as any I’ve tried, squeezing the car into tight spots while displaying synthesized views all around the vehicle.

It also has an advanced driver alert system as standard. It can not only detect if your hands are on the wheel, it uses a special sensor that raises a warning if it thinks you’re distracted, drowsy or inattentive.

Wrap-up

After driving the EX30 for nearly a full day, I’m impressed. While not the most nimble crossover EV, it’s comfortable to drive whether you’re on the freeway or city streets full of potholes. Even in the base single-motor model, the acceleration is more than anyone needs. In the dual-motor performance version, it’s borderline insane. It also offers enough range for reasonably long trips, with support for decently fast charging.

Volvo has more or less nailed the interior, bar a few minor complaints. It ticks all the boxes for buyers looking for an eco-friendly car, particularly the fact that Volvo says it uses 75 percent less CO2 to manufacture than its current EVs. It also uses sustainable materials in the fun but functional interior.

The EX30 has a lot of competition from the likes of Tesla, Volkswagen and Chevy, though, and is at a disadvantage due to the lack of a federal tax credit. The fact that it’s built in China may turn off some buyers, though as mentioned, Volvo just announced it would build some EX30s in Ghent, Belgium, starting in 2025. Still, it should appeal to a lot of consumers looking for something charming, easy to drive and relatively quick, along with fans of the Volvo brand. With all that, the EX30 should be a solid hit in North America and elsewhere.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/volvo-ex30-first-drive-charming-and-eco-friendly-with-power-to-spare-080039873.html?src=rss 

The internet’s “enshittification,” as veteran journalist and privacy advocate Cory Doctorow describes it, began decades before TikTok made the scene. Elder millennials remember the good old days of Napster — followed by the much worse old days of Napster being sued into oblivion along with Grokster and the rest of the P2P sharing ecosystem, until we were left with a handful of label-approved, catalog-sterilized streaming platforms like Pandora and Spotify. Three cheers for corporate copyright litigation.

In his new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, Doctorow examines the modern social media landscape, cataloging and illustrating the myriad failings and short-sighted business decisions of the Big Tech companies operating the services that promised us the future but just gave us more Nazis. We have both an obligation and responsibility to dismantle these systems, Doctorow argues, and a means to do so with greater interoperability. In this week’s Hitting the Books excerpt, Doctorow examines the aftermath of the lawsuits against P2P sharing services, as well as the role that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “notice-and-takedown” reporting system and YouTube’s “ContentID” scheme play on modern streaming sites.

Excerpted from by The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation by Cory Doctorow. Published by Verso. Copyright © 2023 by Cory Doctorow. All rights reserved.

Seize the Means of Computation

The harms from notice-and-takedown itself don’t directly affect the big entertainment companies. But in 2007, the entertainment industry itself engineered a new, more potent form of notice-and-takedown that manages to inflict direct harm on Big Content, while amplifying the harms to the rest of us. 

That new system is “notice-and-stay-down,” a successor to notice-and-takedown that monitors everything every user uploads or types and checks to see whether it is similar to something that has been flagged as a copyrighted work. This has long been a legal goal of the entertainment industry, and in 2019 it became a feature of EU law, but back in 2007, notice-and-staydown made its debut as a voluntary modification to YouTube, called “Content ID.” 

Some background: in 2007, Viacom (part of CBS) filed a billion-dollar copyright suit against YouTube, alleging that the company had encouraged its users to infringe on its programs by uploading them to YouTube. Google — which acquired YouTube in 2006 — defended itself by invoking the principles behind Betamax and notice-and-takedown, arguing that it had lived up to its legal obligations and that Betamax established that “inducement” to copyright infringement didn’t create liability for tech companies (recall that Sony had advertised the VCR as a means of violating copyright law by recording Hollywood movies and watching them at your friends’ houses, and the Supreme Court decided it didn’t matter). 

But with Grokster hanging over Google’s head, there was reason to believe that this defense might not fly. There was a real possibility that Viacom could sue YouTube out of existence — indeed, profanity-laced internal communications from Viacom — which Google extracted through the legal discovery process — showed that Viacom execs had been hotly debating which one of them would add YouTube to their private empire when Google was forced to sell YouTube to the company. 

Google squeaked out a victory, but was determined not to end up in a mess like the Viacom suit again. It created Content ID, an “audio fingerprinting” tool that was pitched as a way for rights holders to block, or monetize, the use of their copyrighted works by third parties. YouTube allowed large (at first) rightsholders to upload their catalogs to a blocklist, and then scanned all user uploads to check whether any of their audio matched a “claimed” clip. 

Once Content ID determined that a user was attempting to post a copyrighted work without permission from its rightsholder, it consulted a database to determine the rights holder’s preference. Some rights holders blocked any uploads containing audio that matched theirs; others opted to take the ad revenue generated by that video. 

There are lots of problems with this. Notably, there’s the inability of Content ID to determine whether a third party’s use of someone else’s copyright constitutes “fair use.” As discussed, fair use is the suite of uses that are permitted even if the rightsholder objects, such as taking excerpts for critical or transformational purposes. Fair use is a “fact intensive” doctrine—that is, the answer to “Is this fair use?” is almost always “It depends, let’s ask a judge.” 

Computers can’t sort fair use from infringement. There is no way they ever can. That means that filters block all kinds of legitimate creative work and other expressive speech — especially work that makes use of samples or quotations. 

But it’s not just creative borrowing, remixing and transformation that filters struggle with. A lot of creative work is similar to other creative work. For example, a six-note phrase from Katy Perry’s 2013 song “Dark Horse” is effectively identical to a six-note phrase in “Joyful Noise,” a 2008 song by a much less well-known Christian rapper called Flame. Flame and Perry went several rounds in the courts, with Flame accusing Perry of violating his copyright. Perry eventually prevailed, which is good news for her. 

But YouTube’s filters struggle to distinguish Perry’s six-note phrase from Flame’s (as do the executives at Warner Chappell, Perry’s publisher, who have periodically accused people who post snippets of Flame’s “Joyful Noise” of infringing on Perry’s “Dark Horse”). Even when the similarity isn’t as pronounced as in Dark, Joyful, Noisy Horse, filters routinely hallucinate copyright infringements where none exist — and this is by design. 

To understand why, first we have to think about filters as a security measure — that is, as a measure taken by one group of people (platforms and rightsholder groups) who want to stop another group of people (uploaders) from doing something they want to do (upload infringing material). 

It’s pretty trivial to write a filter that blocks exact matches: the labels could upload losslessly encoded pristine digital masters of everything in their catalog, and any user who uploaded a track that was digitally or acoustically identical to that master would be blocked. 

But it would be easy for an uploader to get around a filter like this: they could just compress the audio ever-so-slightly, below the threshold of human perception, and this new file would no longer match. Or they could cut a hundredth of a second off the beginning or end of the track, or omit a single bar from the bridge, or any of a million other modifications that listeners are unlikely to notice or complain about. 

Filters don’t operate on exact matches: instead, they employ “fuzzy” matching. They don’t just block the things that rights holders have told them to block — they block stuff that’s similar to those things that rights holders have claimed. This fuzziness can be adjusted: the system can be made more or less strict about what it considers to be a match. 

Rightsholder groups want the matches to be as loose as possible, because somewhere out there, there might be someone who’d be happy with a very fuzzy, truncated version of a song, and they want to stop that person from getting the song for free. The looser the matching, the more false positives. This is an especial problem for classical musicians: their performances of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart inevitably sound an awful lot like the recordings that Sony Music (the world’s largest classical music label) has claimed in Content ID. As a result, it has become nearly impossible to earn a living off of online classical performance: your videos are either blocked, or the ad revenue they generate is shunted to Sony. Even teaching classical music performance has become a minefield, as painstakingly produced, free online lessons are blocked by Content ID or, if the label is feeling generous, the lessons are left online but the ad revenue they earn is shunted to a giant corporation, stealing the creative wages of a music teacher.

Notice-and-takedown law didn’t give rights holders the internet they wanted. What kind of internet was that? Well, though entertainment giants said all they wanted was an internet free from copyright infringement, their actions — and the candid memos released in the Viacom case — make it clear that blocking infringement is a pretext for an internet where the entertainment companies get to decide who can make a new technology and how it will function.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-the-internet-con-cory-doctorow-verso-153018432.html?src=rss