Volvo's Upcoming BEV Flagship Sedan Claiming SDV CrownVolvo's Upcoming BEV Flagship Sedan Claiming SDV Crown

Volvo Cars publishes another sneak-peek image of the flagship battery-electric sedan that it claims will be the most advanced software-defined vehicle it has ever made.

Ahead of its official global debut on March 5, the Volvo ES90 will point the way to where the automaker believes its connected cars will evolve in the coming years and be able to improve the capabilities of its core computing technology as new advancements come to market.

It will be the first Volvo to employ a dual Nvidia Drive AGX Orin platform boasting the most powerful compute power to date. This will update its performance continually through data, software and artificial intelligence downloads.

This platform claims the capacity to handle about 508 trillion operations per second to manage functions including AI-based active safety features, car sensors and battery management.

It boasts an eightfold improvement in AI compute performance compared with previous platforms, enabling a gradual increase in the size of its deep learning model and neural network from 40 million to 200 million parameters.

The ES90 is built on Volvo’s SPA2 architecture and is the second car based on the Volvo’s Superset tech stack, following the EX90.

Updates planned to be noticed by the user include new connectivity features, safety improvements and performance enhancements, such as a better battery range derived from how the vehicle is being used.

In line with the brand’s historical focus on safety, the technology is designed to power its "Safe Space Technology" with an advanced understanding of its surroundings through an extensive array of sensors, which includes a lidar, five radars, eight cameras and 12 ultrasonic sensors, plus driver monitoring inside the cabin.

Volvo’s chief engineering and technology officer, Anders Bell, says: “The Volvo ES90 is one of the most technically advanced cars on the market today and is designed to be improved further with time. Built on our state-of-the-art Superset tech stack, the ES90 puts safety at the forefront.”