2025 Volvo EX90 enters production after being delayed last year
After a delay of about eight months, Volvo’s Ridgeville, South Carolina plant is now assembling the EX90 battery-electric SUV. Volvo’s original plan was to get its new flagship in production toward the end of 2023 so that dealers might have models in showrooms early this year. There’s also the reservation list, which filled so quickly that Volvo shut it down sooner than anticipated. However, after the car’s November 2022 reveal, Volvo engineers confronted unexpected complexities with integrating the EX90’s Iris lidar system and Sentinel software, both provided by Luminar Technologies. In May 2023, the automaker officially delayed the start of production until the first half of this year.
The laser-based sensor array will be standard on all EX90 trims, and Volvo’s made a big deal of its inclusion, company CEO Jim Rowan telling Automotive News last summer, “We wanted to make sure that the first time we put lidar into our safety stack … it operates in the way it should.”
Part of the complexity was that the code was being asked to work with Volvo’s new VolvoCars.OS software platform running on a new “core computing” system developed with Nvidia and using the tech company’s Drive Orin chips — the same chips Rivian uses for its new, streamlined electrical architecture in the Gen 2 R1 models. In Volvo’s words, the core computing system “is made up of three main computers. These support each other in operating vision processing and artificial intelligence, general computing and infotainment respectively,” this fundamental change in vehicle brain layout allowing the automaker “to gradually separate hardware from software. This means the company can introduce more frequent hardware cycles, so that new Volvo models can be equipped with the latest available hardware.”
Rowan said he believes the delay will ease the path for what’s coming. With lidar planned for more Volvo offerings, the code will see use elsewhere in the lineup, and what the coders have learned during the delay will serve all the way through to an eventual transition to the Global Product Architecture that will succeed the EX90’s SPA2 architecture.
Back to the South Carolina plant, the first customer car off the line, done up in Denim Blue, will be delivered later this year. The plant’s got more good news as well from the other vehicle it builds, the S60 sedan, with year-to-date sales up 255% compared to 2023.
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