If there’s one word that has historically summed up the Volvo brand, it’s safety. But now that cars have become digital technology products, this no longer just means crumple zones, airbags and hardened passenger compartments. To get top ratings, a car needs sophisticated computer-assisted systems. With the launch of the Volvo ES90, the Swedish company hopes to continue its safety leadership into the digital era. I talked to Alwin Bakkenes, Head of Software Engineering at Volvo, about what the ES90 means for the brand’s core aims.
Volvo ES90: Premium EV Features
The Volvo ES90 has only been launched without giving journalists a chance to drive it yet. But the design is promising. Although it looks like a sedan, the ES90 is a hatchback. This will make it more practical for families, who want plenty of luggage space without being an SUV. Passenger space is superb, too, with plenty of room for adults over six feet tall to sit behind similarly sized people in the front seats.
Electric range is up to 435 miles in the WLTP cycle, and this car uses an 800V architecture (Volvo’s SPA2, also used by the Polestar 3) rather than 400V as used in the Volvo EX30. So it can charge very quickly, able to replenish 186 miles in just ten minutes when connected to a 350kW charger. Battery sizes up to 106kWh and a dual-motor option signal the premium positioning of the ES90. But it’s the computing capability that cements this car as Volvo’s new flagship and leader in the company’s push towards digitally enhanced safety.
“Software is now replacing hardware as a primary driver of innovation,” says Bakkenes. “For Volvo this is all about raising the bar in safety and providing innovative human centric technology. The ES90 is the first Volvo powered with two NVIDIA DRIVE AGS Orin processors, which have computational power of about 500 trillion operations per second (TOPS), making this the most powerful Volvo car ever. These are chips designed for inference tasks around AI. We use them to orchestrate everything in the car with emphasis on our safety stack. The ES90 shares the same underpinnings as the EX90, which was the first car to use SPA2.”
Central to these underpinnings is Volvo’s Superset tech stack. “As with all our products using Superset, the ES90 is designed to improve over time through over the air updates,” says Bakkenes. The EX90 only had one Orin chip, with its second computer the less powerful NVIDIA Xavier series. Volvo intends to offer a free upgrade to all existing EX90 owners, updating the hardware to twin Orin CPUs as well. “The Orin is about eight times more powerful than the Xavier chip for AI compute. This enables us to enhance the number of parameters for our AI models significantly.”
Harnessing The Computing Power Of The Volvo ES90
Although the ES90 has the same sensor array as the EX90, including cameras, radar and LiDAR, the improved compute performance will radically increase its software-enhanced safety capabilities. “We can do more inference on the edge and that gives the systems better performance,” says Bakkenes. “We’re going to leverage this compute power to enhance safety. The ES90 is designed to look out for you with an extremely good perception stack for the surroundings using cameras and radars to enable the car to be reliable in different weather conditions, darkness, and sunlight. The LiDAR can detect obstacles, even small objects, at a very long range and in the dark. We combine that with an advanced driver understanding system with multiple cameras enabling the car to interpret the attentiveness of the driver to build a holistic Advanced Driver-Assistance System (ADAS) solution.”
Volvo’s aim is to go well beyond just providing sufficient technology for a top safety rating. “We do this with real life safety in mind, in every scenario, and that’s what we optimize for,” says Bakkenes. The optimization is improved with every software update. “This is a journey we started a long time ago. Every car that we’ve built for many years is fully over the air updatable. It’s not just for the entertainment system. We can touch every ECU in the car, and we also collect data. That data enables us to understand how to improve systems over time.”
The computing power in the ES90 allows it to contribute data to this optimization process as well as benefit from it. “With the Superset tech stack now in SPA2, we even have the ability to collect raw sensor data that we can use to train our models to improve them over time and then deploy those models back to the vehicles,” says Bakkenes. “Superset underpins all our upcoming electric cars. When we do an enhancement in the ADAS stack, it doesn’t just benefit the ES90. It also benefits the EX90, as well as future cars coming on the Superset tech stack like the EX60.”
“This is the most powerful Volvo to date from a computational perspective and, being software defined, it is designed to be able to evolve continuously,” says Bakkenes. “We can leverage that compute power over time. Initially we combine that with an exceptional sensor array using AI to keep yourself as an occupant in the vehicle, but also your surroundings, safe. That’s what we call Safe Space Technology.”
Volvo ES90: Technology For Future Autonomy
“We’re Volvo and our customers expect us to provide them the safest experience out there,” says Bakkenes. “Collision avoidance is one of the most important things, protecting the occupants of the vehicle, but also the people around the vehicle. The ES90 and EX90 are not just equipped with two computers and a vast array of sensors, including LiDAR. There is also redundancy. There’s redundant braking, steering, and power supply. These cars are truly prepared for autonomous driving. We roll out supervised autonomy first, where it is really working and where it’s safe, and we will progressively enhance the capabilities. But the hardware is prepared for unsupervised autonomy.”
“One of the reasons why we’re upgrading to two Orins is because of the computer requirements that we need to fulfil the self-driving that we envisioned with these cars,” says Bakkenes. “Having 500 TOPS in the cars enables us to do inference in the edge. You cannot do self-driving tasks in the cloud. You need to do all of that locally. We also have enough compute power to run scenarios in shadow mode, so we can deploy new algorithms, and before we activate them, test them and see how the behavior is in the real world, to build the necessary confidence. We equipped these cars with 5G connectivity, too, so we can upload perception data to a data center where we ingest and process it. We analyze it and decide whether that needs to become part of the training stack.”
“It’s a double revolution,” says Bakkenes. “The car is a computer now, but you’ve also got the ability to fast track development by going through many scenarios in simulation with a digital twin before testing them physically. Having this amount of compute power in the ES90, there is so much more we can do with the system. One of the powerful parts of our transformation is that we’re not just building a car. We’re building a Superset tech stack, which we deploy to a wide range of cars, and that enables us to inherit functionality from one car to the other. We might announce a feature for the ES90. The EX90 gets it as well. And the car after, which of course makes us much more efficient over time.”
While Volvo shares many parts of its EV technology with other brands in the Geely Group of which it is part, the focus on safety will be a Volvo-specific feature. “These computing sensors enable us to build a customer experience that we believe is truly stunning,” says Bakkenes. “Part of our transformational journey is being able to become a software driven company with thousands of software engineers that can build great products and a machine that enables us to manage all this active safety data.”
“We’ve been data-driven from the early 70s when we went out with measuring tapes to understand what happened in physical crashes,” says Bakkenes. “We implemented connectivity back in 2020 on every car to collect real life data from events. We’ve been collecting telemetry data from actual or near crashes as they happen to help increase our understanding of real-life safety.” The computing power of the Volvo ES90 could help tie this data together for the ultimate in safe driving.
