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.

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.

Poor assistance from Volvo Sweden and Uk

Following a previous update to the app I found it would it would no longer work and crashed at start up. Zero assistance from either Volvo Uk or Volvo Sweden who both despite them being the point of contact for customers from the app etc simply referred me to uk dealer who simply told me there are no reported issues on the internally technical forum for their workshops. After multi re installs of both the app and full IOS re installs from back up still no good. Only way to get it to work was a full fresh phone IOS install. Very inconvenient as lost all my apps, setting and passwords. Phone is now a mess. Thanks Volvo for screwing up my phone and you little and no assistance. Clearly there eas some issue and conflict between an update and IOS. Very disappointed plus as yet no increase in functionality. While I understand my 2018 v40 will not support many functions of newer and higher spec cars it really doesn’t do a lot.