Volvo will reveal the fully electric ES90 next month on March 5 as one of five new or refreshed models the Swedish carmaker planned for this year. Before the debut, we are given preliminary details of the upcoming sedan which is the second to be built on the SPA2 platform after the EX90.
According to Volvo, the ES90 is a software-defined vehicle that uses its Superset tech stack, a single set of hardware and software modules that will underpin all of its future electric vehicles (EVs). The sedan will be the first to be equipped with dual Nvidia Drive AGX Orin computers to be come the brand’s most powerful car created in terms of core computing capacity.
The Drive AGX Orin system features a computational power of around 508 trillion operations per second (also known as TOPS) to handle artificial intelligence (AI) functions, safety features, car sensors and battery management.
Volvo adds that Drive AGX Orin provides an eightfold improvement in AI compute performance compared to the older Drive AGX Xavier, which enables the gradual increase of the size of its deep learning model and neural network from 40 million to 200 million parameters. Over time as more data is collected and with continuous development, the goal is to improve the customer experience and safety levels.
The Superset tech stack is key to enabling such improvements over the car’s lifecycle, with updates being rolled out in a quicker manner thanks to more focused integration. Knowledge gained from one model can also applied to other models simultaneously, with Volvo saying “software now replaces hardware as the primary driver of innovation and value creation for our customers.”
Moving forward, the first SPA2-based model – the EX90 – will be upgraded to use the dual Drive AGX Orin configuration from the current setup that includes Drive AGX Orin and Drive AGX Xavier. “This is a tangible example of how our Superset tech stack approach allows us to upgrade the hardware of our cars as new technologies become available. Existing customers of the EX90 will get an upgrade of their cars free of charge,” the company wrote in its release.
The ES90 will come with what Volvo is called ‘Safe Space Technology’, which are systems designed to detect obstacles and activate proactive safety measures (such as collision avoidance). This includes an array of sensors such as one lidar, five radars, seven cameras and 12 ultrasonic sensors.
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