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Designers: Florian Mockenhaupt, Katharina Sachs, Maxime Prevoteaux, Lisa Reeves, Clement Alliot, Patrik Müller, Rekha Meena, Volvo Cars, Gothenburg, Sweden
Manufacturer: Volvo Car Corporation, Gothenburg, Sweden

The Volvo EX30 is designed to be the most sustainable Volvo car to date, and its smallest SUV, without compromising the premium experience and safety Volvo buyers expect. With the EX30 they delivered a fully electric SUV that is small while projecting confidence, maturity, and versatility and instantly recognisable as a Volvo, it also pushes the Scandinavian design language further into the electric age.

Though the EX30 is smaller than any other Volvo SUV, the goal was to translate and retain the confidence, maturity, and Scandinavian simplicity of Volvo’s larger cars without becoming a caricature of them. Starting with a solid form, the designers of EX30 carved away mass, just as they would on larger Volvo cars. The design of EX30 uses proportion and sophisticated surfacing and structuring to exude confidence through means other than sheer size.

To maximise interior space and versatility in a small footprint, the EX30 follows “cab modern” proportions: wheels pushed to the corners, with short and equal overhangs, creating a long wheelbase and a visually planted stance. Designers also made sure to retain what attracts customers to SUVs in the first place: versatility, a high seating position, and a rugged appearance.

But even in a small package, designers and engineers did not diminish the premium quality and advanced safety expected of a Volvo car. What they did do was adapt Volvo technology to the urban use cases of EX30, for example by adding a new door open alert that cares for other road users by warning when a bicycle is approaching from behind the car.

To achieve the premium experience, accessible price point, and high sustainability goals of the EX30, Volvo designers had to rethink everything. The guiding principle was how to do more with less; to try and get more than one use out of as many components as possible, thereby reducing the materials needed. This goal serves to help reduce the carbon impact of EX30, to increase interior space for roominess and comfort, and to reduce costs, allowing us to make electric cars and Volvo safety more accessible to more people.

A great example is the sound bar, located at the front of the cabin under the windshield. Rather than place speakers all around the car, the soundbar uses the natural acoustics of the cabin to project sound from a single source of five speakers. This saves componentry—reduced wiring running through the cabin; fewer speakers–and allows the designers to minimise the depth the door panel, widening the seating area for passengers, and expanding the door pockets for additional storage space.

Examples like this abound inside the EX30, such as the instrument panel that also serves as the sides of the air vents, the use of a single screen for all driver information, and centralised window switches that again reduce wiring and packaging needs.

But Volvo designers considered much more than just the experience of the drivers and passengers of EX30. They also looked to sustainable solutions in how the car is constructed and even how it’s recycled. Utilising materials that would otherwise go to waste–denim fibers that are too short to recycle, flax, and scraps of PVC window frames, for example–help to reduce the amount of net new material needed in the EX30 and divert these products from landfills.

And even for new materials, designers found innovative ways to reduce unused byproducts, such as by 3D knitting the textile seat inserts in the exact shape needed–no scraps from cutting it out of larger pieces of fabric.

Recycled plastics in the door panels that are unpainted and instead embossed with patterns inspired by granite from Mariestad, Sweden, not only add texture and interest to the interior but also are much easier to recycle, as the paint does not need to first be separated from the plastic.

The Volvo EX30 is instantly identifiable as a Volvo while pushing the envelope of what Volvo design can be. Up front, a new, digital interpretation of our signature Thor’s hammer headlights sit on either side of the iconic Volvo diagonal from 1927, now adapted into a grille-less format more suitable for electric cars.

The EX30 also embraces the fun, colourful, playful side of Scandinavian design that pushes the boundaries of what customers expect from a Volvo. Outside, bold colours inspired by Swedish nature predominate and inside, natural and recycled materials in daring new expressions can be found. And all this is illuminated in sensory experiences that mimic the feel of being in the Nordics, soothing drivers and passengers with natural colours and gentle motion.

But it wouldn’t be true Scandinavian design with playfulness alone—form and function must coexist in harmony. This is where you get helpful details like the “Will it fit?” graphic inside the tailgate that provides cargo area dimensions in clear view when packing the car—no tape measure needed.