Volvo Doubles Down on the Software-Defined Car — CleanTechnica Field Trip – CleanTechnica

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Volvo invited CleanTechnica to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of its Charleston automotive factory where they will be adding production capacity for the XC60 and another yet-to-be-announced, second-generation, extended-range electric vehicle by 2030.

Disclaimer: Volvo paid for the author’s travel and accommodations to attend this event.

We sat down with Volvo Cars’ Chief Engineer and Chief Technology Officer Anders Bell at the event to dig into the technology that powers their electric vehicles and underpins their next-generation ADAS safety systems. The upgraded dual-chip Nvidia Drive ATX-based core computer coming to the EX90 is the foundation for what Volvo calls the “superset” software stack for its next-generation software-defined car.

Volvo will also upgrade the computers in the 2025 Volvo EX90 to the new Nvidia Orin-based system on a chip. This simplifies the hardware landscape they have to develop software for and simplifies their software version management.

The Software- & Energy-Defined Vehicle

The transition to electric vehicles for Volvo has not come without difficulty as software continues to be an increasingly important part of the vehicle. “It’s a massive transition for us as a company,” Bell told us. “Not only being a car company but also being a software company. It’s not either or. You need to be both in 2025.”

Automotive software in most cars seems to be stuck in the 1990s, highlighting just how difficult it is for automotive companies to build reliable, intuitive, and cutting edge software. “We’re one of the very few legacy carmakers who pulled it off,” he said.

It centers around the concept of the software- and energy-defined car that requires automotive companies to become experts at both the vehicles themselves and the software that powers them. “[The software- and energy-defined vehicle is] a way to try to describe the two simultaneous profound transformations going on in automotive, and they happen to coincide,” Bell said.

Volvo’s first shot at building a software-defined electric vehicle was the EX90, and what shipped to customers was not perfect. The software was buggy and plagued early owners. “I can’t say how sorry we are for customers who have lost trust in our products,” Bell told us in a roundtable discussion at the event. “We will do everything we can to regain that trust. We’re working super hard on this.”

Instead of derailing their progress, the early software issues galvanized the team and seemed to have strengthened their resolve to deliver. They put their heads down and developed and pushed out a series of over-the-air software updates starting in June 2025 that have largely resolved the early issues. “The over-the-air updates we’ve done have been successful,” Bell said. “We’ve solved those problems and will never have them again.”

A Cultural Paradigm Shift

The key to building and becoming a great automotive software organization was extremely difficult for Volvo because in a software-defined electric vehicle, software touches every aspect of the vehicle. “You need to approach the product development and the car with a software-first mindset,” Bell said. “That doesn’t come naturally. It takes some time to build that.”

As hardware changes are explored, corresponding changes on the software side must also be taken into account as equal shareholders in the process. “It needs to be a natural part of everything you do.” If the software team is downstream in the design process, they are not an equal partner in the process and are forced to eat the results of whatever decisions are made upstream.

“Part of the mistake would be building it into a different organization,” Bell said. Standing up their own internal software team has required a top to bottom cultural change in the company which was a major undertaking.

Bell sees a world where over-the-air updates are the norm at Volvo. “It adds a third or fourth dimension to your thinking as an automotive engineer or developer,” he said.

That means not only making hardware and software decisions to build the best vehicle for today, but for years out, where updates are pushed out to a fleet of millions of customer-owned electric vehicles. It’s an impressive exercise in long term thinking which makes complete sense coming from a company like Volvo.

“We’ve had a tough journey, but we’ve come through on the other side much wiser, much better now,” Bell said.

A New Generation

The 2026 Volvo EX90 will be the first Volvo with the upgraded computer and has been the primary focus for the development of the superset of ADAS solutions using its full stack of sensors. As the flagship electric Volvo, the EX90 is getting all the bells and whistles.

“We can scale down the sensor set and any leaner configuration would benefit from correlating upgrades,” he said. “So you can do entry level ADAS systems as long as it’s in the same tech stack that will have a lot of benefit from the EX90.”

From there, Volvo can deploy components from the same superset of software and hardware to all of its vehicles. Different ADAS modules can be “bolted on” — literally for the hardware and digitally on the software side — depending on which sensors the new vehicle has. Bell shared that this same superset software stack would underpin the upcoming EX60, which will be revealed on January 21st in Stockholm, Sweden.

The superset of software is made of multiple software modules, including Android Auto. “The stack contains a lot of elements. Android Auto is one of those elements.” Volvo acts primarily as the hardware architect and builder, but also the architect and integrator on the software side of the vehicle.

The Path Forward

Transitioning the entire company from a hardware-focused automotive company to a fully integrated hardware and software company was a major undertaking. It’s a hard pill to swallow, because from a customer perspective, Volvo hasn’t delivered much in tangible benefits from its software team. “We are in a position where we have launched a product but we have yet to reap the benefits,” he said. “We need to make the hard journey count.”

With their heads above water on the EX90, Anders and his software team have an eye to the future. “Now we know what great looks like,” he said. The reveal of the new Volvo EX60 is right around the corner and he’s visibly excited about it. Like a kid on Christmas who can’t wait for you to open the present he spent so much time picking out. “What I’m looking forward to most of all right now is to show the world the EX60.”

After a little coaxing, he opened up about it. “It’s going to be really, really competitive. Uncompromised electric vehicles,” he said. “That’s around the corner.”

Volvo has teased a reveal of the new EX60 on January 21st and we can’t wait to see what they bring to the party along with it as the company starts truly leveraging its newly earned software chops to delight customers. “There’s a long list of proof points coming,” Bell told us.

Volvo has been one of the most innovative automotive companies on the planet for decades, and we can’t wait to see what’s next now that they have put in the hard work to learn how to built robust, extremely capable and safe electric vehicles for generations to come.

A Modular EV Platform

On the way out, he dropped a little easter egg about the new platform that will underpin the EX60, hinting at a new modular platform: “SPA2 is designed to scale all the way from B to F.”

That’s everything from small cars like Volvo’s classic C30 all the way on up to the big boy EX90. Keep an eye out for more about this as we get closer to the official unveiling event in January.