At the recent Volvo Cars Tech Moment event, Volvo Cars unveiled its future technology plans as part of the company’s process toward becoming a completely electric and top-shelf automotive business by 2030. Volvo has gone on record saying that its upcoming generations of electric cars will raise the bar for improvements in driving range and fast charging.
However, there’s more to Volvo’s story at the event than just electric advancements. The company is creating a series of electric cars that are as accessible and practical as an ICE vehicle. Efforts to partner with Swedish battery specialist Northvolt to bolster lithium-ion battery development will reportedly help Volvo achieve 50%-energy-density gains in support of 621-mile (1,000-km) world-tested driving ranges by the mid 2020’s.
Developing the proper batteries and affiliated software will prove essential toward bringing more of Volvo’s engineering and EV development in-house instead of third party. Part of the company’s design plans involve collecting substantial computer functions from the plethora of electronic control units around the new vehicles in order to place them into a single NVIDIA-designed core computing system. This exciting tech is slated to be demonstrated in a new model in 2022.
The custom and centralized computing system will run on Volvo Cars’ in-house operating system called VolvoCars.OS and receive over-the-air updates to grow and improve cars quickly over time. These updates will help Volvo collect real-time customer driving information via sensors on the vehicles. The collected data will help the company further identify issues and send improvements and new features more efficiently, even reducing some development time frames by years into just days.
Beginning with the successor to Volvo’s XC90 model, the company plans to provide bi-directional charging, which would allow customers to redirect excess electricity in their car battery straight into the power grid. This means electric Volvo drivers could offer energy to the grid itself.
“We need to transform this company from just a premium conventional company. We need to transform it into a leader in the new premium electric segment, which is growing very fast,” said Volvo CEO Håkan Samuelsson. “We need to understand batteries in the same way we understand the combustion engine.”
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