I’d group automakers into three camps when it comes to making electric cars with great software and technology.
Leading the pack are Tesla and Rivian, which have set clear benchmarks for in-vehicle software. Then there are the so-called legacy automakers, such as General Motors and the Volkswagen Group, which are trying hard, stumbling often, and still making some progress.
The last group is barely even trying. It includes Toyota and Stellantis—both of which seem far too comfortable selling gas cars and hybrids, but are dabbling in EVs just enough to say that they’re in on the transition.
Volvo falls squarely in the middle group. Trying, stumbling and trying again.
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Source: InsideEVs
Take the Volvo EX90, for example. The electric SUV was supposed to showcase Volvo’s transition to being an electric vehicle and tech giant. But the company delayed its launch by more than a year due to software issues. When the $82,000-plus electric SUV finally went on sale in the U.S. late last year, the gremlins weren’t gone.
Owners complained of digital keys that repeatedly failed and infotainment screens that flashed error messages or, in some cases, went completely blank. Some even reported the vehicle losing power on the highway, and air conditioning systems that stopped working. InsideEVs’ own first drive review found the car buggy and unfinished, with a laundry list of promised-but-missing features like Apple CarPlay, smart charging and advanced driver assistance functions.
Volvo EX90 assorted bugs.
Photo by: Volvo EX90 software problems
The software problems came at the worst possible time for the company. Its global sales have been plummeting due to intense competition in Europe and China. And the Trump administration’s tariffs and the rollback of the federal tax credit aren’t making things any better.
In a media roundtable with reporters last week and one-on-one interviews with InsideEVs at an event held at its U.S. manufacturing center in Ridgeville, South Carolina, Volvo executives acknowledged what owners were experiencing and said they were racing to fix the bugs. They explained what caused the software nightmares in the first place, and outlined the company’s plans to address them.
Volvo EX90 at its U.S. manufacturing site in Ridgeville, South Carolina.
Photo by: Suvrat Kothari
“Unfortunately, we have disappointed many customers,” Anders Bell, the Chief Engineering and Technology Officer at Volvo Cars, told InsideEVs. “I’m going to say sorry to the customers who have lost trust in our products. We are doing everything we can to regain that trust, and we’re working super hard on this,” he added.
Bell is no stranger to software headaches. He was Tesla’s Senior Director of Engineering for over six years before moving back to Volvo, where he has spent most of his career. Now he’s using his decades of automotive experience to put the company on the right track.
Where Things Went Wrong
Bell suggested that Volvo’s software problems stemmed from its old way of building cars, relying on domain-based systems and stitching together different lines of code from dozens of suppliers rather than developing a unified system. With its SPA2 platform—as well as the next-generation SPA3 platform—the company is now moving to a single in-house software stack, but the transition has been messy for SPA2.
Automotive software typically runs on dozens of separate computers, one for infotainment, another for braking, another for climate control and so on.
Volvo EX90 and the SPA2 platform
Each is often supplied by a different vendor, and it’s the automaker’s job to make all those systems communicate with one another, usually by synchronizing signals across a network. That complexity makes bugs more likely. If one system fails, it can trigger glitches across the vehicle, from blank infotainment screens to sudden power loss.
Volvo isn’t alone in facing these issues. This transition has been tough for the whole industry. Tesla and Rivian faced software nightmares early on before ironing them out. General Motors’ electrification plans were delayed due to software troubles. During routine testing here at InsideEVs in late 2023, the Chevy Blazer EV stranded reporter Kevin Williams in rural Virginia, prompting a temporary stop-sale order on the vehicle.
Volvo EX90 and the SPA2 platform
“If you want to really fill the car with a lot of attractive software, it cannot be done by buying boxes from suppliers,” Volvo Cars Global CEO and President Hakan Samuelsson told InsideEVs. “There’s frustrated customer experience and a lot of bad stuff. But if you look where we are right now and where we’ll be after the next download in two weeks, we are at a level where we should have been from the start,” Samuelsson said.
From left: Volvo Cars Global CEO Hakan Samuelsson, President of Americas Luis Rezende, Chief Supply Chain Officer Francesca Gamboni, Chief Commercial Officer Erik Severinson and Chief Engineering and Technology Officer Anders Bell.
Photo by: Suvrat Kothari
The automaker is now moving away from this decades-old way of making cars. To make the experience more seamless for owners, software-defined vehicles consolidate functions into a handful of centralized, highly powerful computers running on a single software stack.
Instead of stitching together code from dozens of suppliers, Volvo is now trying to integrate everything in-house in order to make updates smoother, functions more compatible, and problems that can be fixed quickly over the air rather than at the workshop.
How Volvo Is Fixing Its Software
While the company faced a tough journey with its SPA2 platform, it claims to have ironed out the problems with a major over-the-air software update in June (1.3.18), according to Bell. That update makes the digital keys more reliable, with fewer “key not found” errors and a smoother user experience, according to Volvo.
But even after this release, owners are experiencing a raft of problems. One Reddit user reported inaccurate road sign and speed limit detection, user profiles that failed to save one pedal drive function, inconsistent internet connection, and more.
Others are still reporting digital key and infotainment issues. Consumer Reports wrote a scathing review of the vehicle, concluding that the car should not have been sold before the software bugs were fixed.
Now, the company will release another major over-the-air software update in two weeks, where “everything gets improved,” Bell said.
“This is the birth of our own in-house software stack, which is now going to underpin all our cars going forward,” Bell said. The automaker has developed what it calls a “Superset” tech stack, which is basically a standardized set of modules, software and hardware that the EX90 and all future Volvos will come equipped with.
Superset contains the company’s new “software master,” a unified platform that will underpin the Polestar 3, EX90, ES90 and upcoming EX60. Instead of writing separate code for each model, developers will build functions once for the entire tech stack, which will then be adapted across different cars and hardware versions.
Volvo EV Architecture Mockup
Photo by: Volvo
The current SPA2 platform uses what Volvo calls its first generation (or partial) zonal architecture with an Nvidia computer for driving-related functions and a Qualcomm processor for the infotainment. The next-generation SPA3 platform, which will debut on the EX60 mid-size SUV next year, will feature a full zonal architecture, with improvements Bell said should have been made earlier on the SPA2 platform itself.
Part of this overhaul also includes giving the EX90 SUV a major hardware upgrade, which the company says is unrelated to the software bugs and more about future-proofing the EVs.
The model year 2026 EX90 will feature a more powerful centralized computer, which is an Nvidia Drive AGX Orin-based system. Owners of model year 2025 vehicles will get the upgraded computer for free through a scheduled service center visit. (The current EX90 also has Nvidia computers, but now it will get a more powerful dual-configuration set-up.)
With this upgrade, both the 2025 EX90 and the 2026 model will also have an active lidar—a powerful sensor mounted above the windshield—which will enable advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) to work smoothly even in the dark.
The lidar and the more powerful computer will also allow improved collision avoidance, emergency steering and pedestrian detection at nighttime. Until now, the lidar sensor that came standard on every EX90 has only collected data and has not served any active function. The 2026 EX90 now gets an active lidar, and the 2025 EX90’s lidar will be activated after the scheduled hardware upgrade with the new Nvidia chip.
“The software-defined vehicle is in many ways a more profound change than electrification,” Bell said. “We’ve made it through, and now the products will be better and better over time.”
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