In the runup to the Volvo ES90 electric sedan reveal today, the company has been ratcheting up the release of details on its next fully electric model. It says that its latest launch further exemplifies its approach around the software-defined car that is designed to continuously evolve and improve through core computing technology, constant connectivity, and data.

The ES90 will be the first Volvo car equipped with a dual Nvidia Drive AGX Orin in-vehicle configuration, making it the most powerful car in terms of core computing capacity. This allows the automaker to raise the bar on safety and overall performance through better data, software, and AI (artificial intelligence).

The dual-Orin configuration will also be implemented on Volvo’s EX90 SUV, upgrading from the combination of Orin and the previous-generation Xavier computer. In line with Volvo’s philosophy of continuous improvement, existing EX90 customers will get an upgrade of their cars free of charge.

With a high level of computational power of around 508 TOPS (trillion operations per second), the new dual-Orin system manages functionalities such as AI-based active safety features, car sensors, and efficient battery management. It provides an eightfold improvement in AI compute performance compared with Drive AGX Xavier, enabling Volvo to increase the size of its deep learning model and neural network from 40 million to 200 million parameters over time as engineers collect more data and continue to develop the model with the overall goal of improving customer experience and, most importantly, safety levels.

 

Volvo’s new approach

The ES90 is the second car following the EX90 built on Volvo Cars’ SPA2 vehicle architecture. It is based on its Superset tech stack, which represents a radical transformation in how the automaker can develop and use software to improve levels of safety, technology, and overall performance throughout the car’s lifecycle. It consists of a single set of hardware and software modules and systems underpinning all its upcoming electric cars.

At its September 2024 Capital Markets Day held in Gothenburg, Sweden, Volvo Cars revealed the new approach that will define the company’s future by channeling all its engineering efforts into one direction—making cars that get better with time. That means that work on the EX90 will directly benefit the ES90, and the work done for the ES90 will carry on both into the development of the EX60 coming after it as well as improving the EX90 already in the hands of its customers.

With the Superset tech stack approach, Volvo now does closed-loop development based on data, connectivity, software, and core computing. Company execs say that the shift to core computing is at least as significant as the shift to electrification. It impacts anything connected to the cars’ electrical system, and the potential benefits are huge.

With the Superset tech stack, Volvo can make such improvements more efficiently and roll them out faster via over-the-air updates and across all models based on the Superset. Those updates could include new connectivity features, safety improvements, and other enhancements that can elevate the performance of the car such as a better battery range for your car for certain driving behaviors.

“We innovate in all areas of technology to become a leader in software-defined cars, and we’re channeling all our engineering efforts into one direction: making great cars that get even better over time,” said Anders Bell, Chief Engineering and Technology Officer at Volvo Cars. “By combining the power of core computing and our Superset tech stack, we can now make safer cars more efficiently than ever before.”

Volvo Cars calls everything it puts in a car meant to build a safe space for everyone in and around the car its Safe Space Technology, which is designed to help avoid accidents and hazards on the road with the aim of making your everyday journey safer and more enjoyable.

The ES90 understands its surroundings with an advanced array of sensors, which includes one lidar, five radars, eight cameras, and twelve ultrasonic sensors, as well as an advanced driver understanding system inside the car. Safety systems are designed to help keep occupants safe by detecting obstacles even in darkness, stresses the company, and activating proactive safety measures such as collision avoidance.

 

Benefitting from EX90 and SP2 development

The ES90 sedan benefits from the development of the EX90 SUV. Futurride got behind the wheel of EX90 last year with Alwin Bakkenes, Head of Software Engineering, for a discussion on Volvo’s software-defined future and the vehicle’s SPA2 platform shared with Polestar 3. The EX90 and the SP2 took longer to get to market due to challenges in software integration.

“In the middle of COVID, we started this big industrial project where we built a software development organization,” said Bakkenes, who brings software expertise to Volvo from his roles at Zenseact, HaleyTek, and Aptiv. “Integrating all that software on our own, finding the ability to deploy that fast into the cars, and ironing out the bugs just took a little longer than we had planned.”

However, he says that developing a software-defined-vehicle approach was crucial to Volvo’s mission.

“We are really committed to the people that buy our products to be pioneers of protecting people and planet,” he said. “We want to make sure that we build products that are safe, that we do this in a sustainable fashion, and build customer experiences that make [for] an enjoyable product to own and operate.”

The new architecture enabled engineers to focus on Volvo’s core value of safety, capitalizing on the company’s decades of real-life safety understanding to enable a long-term vision towards zero crash fatalities.

“We’ve been able to use that know-how to build a stack on our own using an immensely powerful sensor set,” said Bakkenes of the EX90. “We use all of that to enable the computers to see better than we’ve ever been able to see, and to deliver even better safety performance.”

The most visible of the sensors is the Luminar lidar on the roof. It is part of an exterior suite of long-range forward-looking radar, four corner radars, 360-degree cameras for parking views, and long-range cameras in the mirrors and in front and back. Inside are cameras, radars, and a robust system that monitors the eyes and focus of the driver.

In preparation for autonomous driving, the EX90 is equipped with redundant braking systems to support the requirements to do “hands off” driving. Other enablers are the first use of Google HD maps, information collected from exterior sensors, and safety software from Zenseact.

The EX90 has two core computers with a combined compute power of about 280 TOPS. According to Bakkenes, one of the core computers does basic ADAS collision avoidance technology and basic car functionality. The other one is focused on deep learning tasks and lidar perception and provides failsafe duplication redundancy in the system in preparation for autonomous driving.

The EX90 is launching with an SAE Level 2 automated driving system and plans for Level 3 in Europe and China first.

“We’re going to launch the cars, do data collection with a fleet, and then deploy full self-driving,” he said. “We’ll have our Pilot Assist offering that helps you drive but you’re in full control, and what we’re planning to release is actually where you can be hands off, eyes off.”

The new architecture enables Volvo engineers to speed development, according to Bakkenes.

“We are working with partners on certain pieces like Nvidia on the silicon in the car, in our data center, with the same silicon in desktops using some of their tools,” he said. “That enables us to iterate really fast, from development to simulating and training models at scale.”

Model quality and iteration speed are dependent on the amount of data and compute, and that’s how the AI gives a boost to the platform.

“It’s fully connected, we do OTA on everything, we have access to sensor data,” said Bakkenes. “We can use the sensor data to train our models, verify them in a virtual environment, then in a complete vehicle, and deploy them back to the car. We’re able to improve the product not in a matter of years [but] in a matter of months.”

Overall, Bakkenes is most proud of two aspects of the new software-defined development approach.

“Number one is what we’re doing with safety and how we’re able to take safety to a completely new level in the car,” he said. “The second thing is that, when we talk about our approach to technology, we’re taking a human-centric approach. It’s not just tech for tech’s sake.”

It enables Volvo developers to focus on what’s important to Volvo customers, and the experience is a further development of the open-ecosystem partnership with Google.

“In the Polestar 2 and the XC 40, we pioneered the deployment of Android Automotive,” concluded Bakkenes. “It’s basically the ecosystem you would have on your mobile phone or your other devices that you can bring into the vehicle. It’s not intimidating, but it’s very high-tech. We provide a calm, infotainment experience with good voice control and fantastic audio.”

 

From SP2 to SP3

Continuing their new approach to making cars that get better with time, Volvo Cars engineers are developing a new electric technology base called SPA3 also underpinned by the Superset tech stack. The first car to be built on SPA3 will be the upcoming all-electric EX60 midsize SUV.

Among the key upgrades for SPA3 over SPA2 will be enhanced core computing capability for higher performance and improved features. But the most important change is that the new architecture will be far more scalable than its predecessor. This means that the company could develop and build cars larger than the EX90 and smaller than the EX30 using the same technology base. The modularity and upgradeability of SPA3 will allow for lower investment costs—with lower variance in relation to sales, which in turn should lead to a stronger future cash flow.

By having a scalable SPA3 architecture, Volvo expects to create increased synergies and improve technology efficiency when it comes to core computing, batteries, e-motors, megacasting, and modular manufacturing—all factors that contribute to significantly driving down the costs of producing cars.

Volvo’s Torslanda plant and its preparation for SP3 production showcase its approach to future manufacturing, with all capabilities needed for production located in the same area. The company says the approach becomes especially powerful when it can use the same key components across all vehicles built on SPA3, meaning that complexity goes down and flexibility goes up.