[GuidoBrunetti]

According to a Google search, the population size of the Republic of Ireland is only 4.77 million whereas that of the United Kingdom is 65.6 million.

Perhaps the ROI market is so small that they don’t have many local staff and so decisions on model features are taken elsewhere, maybe even at HQ, whereas the Volvo UK staff have to justify their existence by pretending to understand UK market requirements (ie copy what BMW and Audi offer).

I can quite easily understand that Volvo might wish to restrict the range of interior options for all right hand drive markets versus those available for left hand drive so they don’t get left with unuseable components but that’s clearly not the case here.