2008 Volvo C30

Sometimes the sum of a car's qualities exceeds the reality of its particulars. Take our Volvo C30, which arrived at Automobile Magazine's New York bureau for its Four Seasons test in September 2007.

Quick (227 hp, 236 lb-ft of torque quick) but not superquick, serene yet subtly involving. A fine roadholder but not a dedicated corner-flogging machine. With the C30's compact dimensions and a single engine option - Volvo's slightly gruff 2.5-liter turbocharged five-cylinder - refinement didn't figure to be the Volvo's strong suit, but refined it was.

The C30 was reasonably economical, too, although at 25 mpg overall it wasn't wildly so. The right size for the city, it was also right at home on the freeway. And while hardly large (the C30 is nine inches shorter than Volvo's smallest sedan, the S40), this moderately hot hatch, new for 2008, turned out to be bigger on the inside than you'd think and surprisingly comfortable, except for a nonadjustable seatbelt that rubbed short drivers' necks.

It was beautiful, too, in an oddball way, although few of us loved the color save contributor Ronald Ahrens, who thought our C30 could extinguish his lust for the funky BMW Z4 coupe. Strangely cool is what our C30 was.

Our metallic blue example came with a Spartan gray cloth interior and checked in with 796 Volvo press-fleet miles on the clock. It spent the next seven months piling on more than 16,000 miles commuting in and out of New York City and up and around the eastern seaboard on various weekend jaunts and business road trips, venturing to Washington, D.C., and as far as Charlotte, North Carolina. Then, the C30 was off to spend the remainder of its year in Ann Arbor.

Although it is a brilliant work of design both inside and out and is well-executed, with better-than-average interior materials carefully assembled, our C30 in so-called Version 1.0 base-level trim was leaner than an anorexic's tofu dinner - no cruise control or trip computer to distract the driver and not much to look at or play with that wasn't gray.

At $25,170 - a total that includes an optional $1250 automatic transmission, which we'd surely skip in favor of Volvo's sweet-shifting six-speed manual, and $475 for metallic paint, but no seat warmers (key for us Snow Belters) - the C30 at first seemed kind of austere for what it was: an expensive, economy-size hatchback. But there was so much more about it to grow on us, starting with its chassis.