September 23, 2025 - Volvo EX90 Gets Major Year 2 Upgrades

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for September 23, 2025, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry.  The Volvo EX90 has had what could charitably be called a rough start to life. Software issues caused its production launch to be delayed by more than a year, and those issues have continued on the production models. Since the first units were sold in July 2024, fewer than 13,000 units have been sold globally. As a result of the delays and slow sales, Volvo opted to update and continue to build the mild hybrid and plug-in hybrid XC90, which the EX90 was originally expected to replace. 

Just over a year after launching the EX90, Volvo is already making substantial updates to the vehicle. It is getting a new 800V electrical architecture, which is shared with the upcoming midsize EX60. The new electrical system will allow for faster charging that adds 155 miles of range in just 10 minutes. Volvo isn't stating what the peak charging power is, but based on this claim, it may be over 300 kW. The higher voltage system should also enable better efficiency and perhaps slightly more range, although that hasn't been confirmed yet. The nature of changing an electrical architecture means this upgrade won't be available to existing owners of the EX90. 

The other change is an upgrade to the core computer that handles the vehicle's driving dynamics and driver assist systems. It will now use dual Nvidia Orin processors that provide a combined 500 trillion operations per second. This will enable new features such as emergency-stop assist. When the driver-understanding system detects that the driver has become unresponsive, it will bring the vehicle to a stop automatically and call for emergency assistance. The EX90 also has expanded automatic emergency steering assistance in darkness, which is enabled by the lidar and radar sensors. Existing EX90 owners will be able to get this computer upgrade free of charge during a service visit. In the past, Volvo has stated a goal of eventually offering automated highway driving with the EX90 through software updates, and the more powerful compute platform will be a part of making this possible when the software is validated. 

Thanks for listening.