The Volvo ES90 will be revealed on Wednesday 5 March as the brand’s most technologically advanced car to date.
The company said the electric saloon – which is closely related to the existing EX90 electric SUV – will pack two Nvidia computers said to be capable of combining to complete around 508 trillion operations per second. For reference, that makes them around 50 times more powerful than a PlayStation 5 games console.
The punch of the computers will allow Volvo to gradually quadruple the size of the information bank for its artificial intelligence, using data collected from cars already on the road.
This should yield improvements to the car’s collision avoidance and autonomous driving systems over time, according to Volvo.
“By combining the power of core computing and our Superset tech stack, we can now make safer cars more efficiently than ever before,” said Volvo tech chief Anders Bell.
Bell added: “The Volvo ES90 is one of the most technically advanced cars on the market today and is designed to be improved further with time.”
To that end, the saloon also gets an array of sensors, including a lidar box, five radars, eight cameras and 12 ultrasonics.
The ES90 will be the fifth series-production electric Volvo model to be offered in the UK – following the EX30, XC40/EX40, C40/EC40 and EX90 – but it's the first that isn’t an SUV. (Volvo also offers the EM90 MPV in China.)
That reflects the current sales dominance of SUVs but, speaking recently, Volvo boss Jim Rowan said the firm will continue to offer a diverse line-up in future. “We have MPVs as well as sedans [saloons] and wagons and of course SUVs,” he said. “We’re in a nice position as a company that we have that spread.”
Rowan added that even though SUVs are likely to continue to make up the bulk of sales, there was enough profit to justify launching an electric saloon. “We’re 1% of the car market and we’re in premium,” he said. “There is still a demand for premium saloons in the electric age. We see more of that [demand] in China, but there’s still demand in other parts of the world.”
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What's going on here? Nobody asked for a car like this, it will have an extemely limited target audience and massive price. The EX90 is a ridiculous £100k, so this will be similiar. Is this really the future or are all car makers trying to destroy themselves? The Chinese can have it, because this is just pointless. Only positive - it's not an SUV, because the world has to be close to DONE with those things.
Almost nothing in this report suggests this is a car that will prove popular in the UK. I'm not saying that popular cars are by definition 'good' but this just seems totally irrelevant: it's advantages over, say, a Skoda Superb hatch or a Kia EV6 are mostly intangible.
The focus on computing power and comment that 'we can now make safer cars more efficiently than ever before' while the selling price approaches six figures suggests it is simply a cash cow for Volvo. At least they are honest about aiming it at the Chinese market.
Packed with super computers and AI rubbish, another Volvo disaster like the 95k EX90 looms.
How can they get it so wrong, again.