Volvo C40 Recharge Is Friendly To The Cause Of Advancing All-Electrics

If ever there was an electric car that will help get the American consumer over the acceptance hump, it is one like the Volvo C40 Recharge. With gasoline at $5 a gallon and up, this new battery-powered entry from the Chinese-owned Swedish brand offers pretty good range, pretty good pep, a pretty good ride experience and a pretty good price.

And that’s what it’s going to take for the industry and regulators to keep moving the needle in the mainstreaming of electric vehicles to which they have so expensively committed American motorists.

Not that it’s fair to put all that baggage on the friendly C40 Recharge. The car is a delightful combination of Volvo design flair and practicality, and a practicable approach to the fact that it is entirely battery-powered.

For example, the C40 Recharge has a dual-motor setup, which supplies 402 horsepower and 486 pound-feet of torque going to all four wheels. That’s a lot of power on call, pretty much matching luxury-EV offerings such as the Audi E-tron, and it means the C40 can accelerate to 60 mph in just 4.7 seconds.

In fact, C40 Recharge offers the kind of driving experience that is going to sell American consumers on the technology overall. It’s very fun to pilot, and in ways that its sibling C40 model, a gasoline-powered one, can’t possibly match. The reason mainly is the immediate availability of massive electric thrust that offers a new dimension to the typical experience behind the wheel for most Americans.

The battery-supplied torque in the C40 Recharge also means that all sorts of maneuvers, including freeway merging and passing, are quick, easy — and safer. This attribute of the C40 Recharge actually saved me from potentially being t-boned on the passenger side when, waiting to make a left turn into a shopping complex on a busy suburban thoroughfare, I moved prematurely from the turning lane because a vehicle in the first oncoming lane obscured a much faster-moving vehicle in the further oncoming lane. C40 Recharge’s torque catapulted me to my destination safely.

The C40 Recharge is powered by a 78-kilowatt-hour battery pack that gives the vehicle an estimated 226 miles of range. That’s pretty much in line with what the current generation of EVs gives owners, and it’s a reasonable one for engaging more drivers in the EV proposition. That kind of range can cover the workaday needs of most Americans, whether it’s commuting or galavanting around town, for a week, giving them the weekend to recharge the C40 if it’s a second vehicle.

I found the C40 Recharge clearly communicated the expected range available, and the depletion in the charge seemed to occur at a steady and predictable rate, unlike my experience in some earlier EVs. There were also plenty of warnings that I probably should think about recharging the C40.

Which brings me to the few complaints I have about the vehicle. First, while the flashing green indicator on the charging cord seemed to indicate that I was providing electricity to the vehicle overnight to recharge it, when I woke up and checked on the C40 in the morning, apparently the juice wasn’t received. I’m not sure what I should have done differently.

Some reviewers like the fact that all you do is get in the car and it turns on, but I don’t. And I don’t think most drivers will. One of the biggest complaints I still have about electric vehicles is that it’s too difficult to tell whether the car is actually engaged or not. The C40 Recharge didn’t help much in that area.

I also believe that Volvo sub-optimized its use of the front “frunk” space, where it only decorously allows space for the charging cord. Instead, couldn’t that be put somewhere in the cargo area where most EVs are stashing them? Volvo should have taken toward its front-trunk space more of the kind of attitude adopted by Ford with its F-150 Lightning pickup truck, which is wide open and flexible for a variety of storage uses. Sure, the C40 Recharge doesn’t have as much space under the hood, but it could be used more creatively.