Volvo Cars 4+

Very handy companion peace of mind

When I first tried to configure my car to work with the app it was not very good experience, I called my UK dealer and they arranged a call back to get some one help me. But in the meantime I approached customer care through the app, surprisingly they have configured my car with the app remotely without me going to dealer or speaking with anyone over phone. It was great !! Ever since I installed this app back in June, it always worked… many times it helped me to check whether car is locked or not and remote locking especially when we were on holidays and parked car bit far from the hotel/ sight seeing locations. The driving journal , car status, pre climate are the features I found it to be more useful. I do drive Mercedes with relevant app, in terms of features volvo seems to lack few on paper but on practicality i see no differences. I hope to see more feature and expect the app will continue to work with same level of reliability.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your great review! We are happy to hear that you like the app and appreciate the features.

Pretty poor app, flawed car

Have had our electric Volvo 8 months. App has been generally poor - a few fixes have been issued which have improved things eg you can now set charge level remotely in the app - although the fact you couldn’t do this originally was ridiculous!!
The range information is rubbish. Simultaneously the cars battery and the google auto car display will show different ranges. The range as you drive varies wildly - you cannot use it to predict how far you can get. The algorithm doesn’t work. In the middle of the journey it says you need to charge to reach a destination that was easily in range with 10% charge remaining at destination when you started. Then you charge eg top up by 25%, but you arrive at the destination with 35% battery left. In other words you could have easily made it with 10% left. It has some sort of over compensated safety measure built in which is in fact really unhelpful. So the range estimation is essentially useless. Well done Volvo.
You cant find the cars location when someone else is driving. Why not if you have enabled that?? And the automatic aircon is not automatic on a £60K car. It doesn’t control
Fan speed. What?? So car mists up when it rains. Also useless. Ride quality is harsh at low speeds - Volvo should have fitted electronic dampers that could have altered settings at low speed.

Developer Response ,

Dear Customer, Thank you for sharing your experience. We apologize for the difficulties you've encountered with the app and vehicle. Your feedback is invaluable and has been forwarded to the relevant team for review. For personalized support, please contact our support team at https://www.volvocars.com/intl/support.

Not bad, but potentially so much more

When it works it's great. Being able to check you locked your car or get mpg for trips is useful. But it's not reliable enough. It often doesn't seem to get updated information, won't refresh reliably, won't let me log in etc.

By far the most annoying thing is that when you check if you locked the car, invariably it says "unlocked" or "door open" for ten seconds or so before updating. Not good for the heart rate. A simple "last updated" time would help a bit. Also, if the battery on the car is low, and it's gone into power saving mode, you don't get an update. Why doesn't the car send an "I'm going to sleep, here's my latest status" to the server?

There are also some things missing I'd like to see: "send location to car" doesn't work for my V40, no detailed trip route (just start and destination on an unzoomable map) and you can't track the position of the car while it's in motion - why not? There are a few issues in trip tracking too; a short trip (a minute or two) followed by another results in the second trip being ignored and the app reporting the wrong location for the car. I phoned the on call centre and they knew where the car was - just the app that was wrong.