Most of my updates on the V40 so far seem to have included a negative aspect of the ownership experience.

That’s a good thing. These reports are meant to be a warts-and-all round-up of how the car has been to live with day-to-day over the previous few weeks. But I can’t help feeling that in doing so I’ve underplayed what a good car  the V40 is. It has a combination of performance, comfort, brand image and low CO2 emissions that few can match.

In spite of this I find myself seeking to get another niggle off my chest, although to be fair, all Volvos have been guilty of this in recent history. The comfort of the seats in a Volvo is legendary. But, for optimised comfort on long journeys, you might need to resort to lumbar support adjustment. And in the V40, as with many Volvos in recent memory, the rotary knob for the lumbar support is positioned in a very difficult to reach area, on the side of the  seats hidden below the front armrest. It’s  disappointing because it’s a problem that hasn’t been fixed for many years.

Anyway, perhaps we will see this changed  to a convenience feature rather than an  inconvenience feature in the near future.