“Of course there’s, at some point, cars go into maintenance, but the majority of the fleet of cars that we have out, we intend to keep on the latest software baselines,” Bakkenes said. While he wouldn’t be drawn on whether HuginCore will be part of the midlife refresh process for SPA2 cars like the EX90, those SUVs do feature the same powerful Nvidia Drive AGX Orin system-on-a-chip that’s integral to making this all work.

“The core compute platform as such, even though we’ve made some changes in EX60 and optimized it, a lot of it is actually common with, for example, SPA2. So a lot of code is being… We have what we call the superset tech stack. We have a superset of code and we do manifest-based configuration towards a specific hardware variant, which means that we actually deploy the same towards a SPA2 car and a SPA3 car, for example, in terms of a lot of functionality,” Bakkenes said.

Nvidia isn’t the only thing powering HuginCore, though. Qualcomm is another partner, and it is supplying its Snapdragon 8255 SoC. Together, that gives “a lot of inference compute… and it’s flexible inference compute. So it enables us to develop AI-based algorithm models for self-driving, for other tasks in the car as well, and do that flexibly. And as we do this, it’s not just that we build a car which is great today, but we are building the foundation with Hugin, which is a flexible compute platform which has access to essentially all the sensors and all the actuators in the car so we can evolve this over time,” he said.

Agentic AI

Volvo was an early adopter of Google’s automotive services, and it’s adding Gemini to the EX60 to give the car a true conversational AI assistant. I’ve long been on record as in favor of good voice control systems in cars, but they have to be natural, and from the sounds of it, this will be. Yes, you can use it to do things like navigate to a specific address or play a particular song. But you can also be a little more vague. Notwithstanding Volvo’s rocky experience with the EX90, the brand’s long-standing and fiercely defended reputation for safety is reassuring when it comes to integrating AI agents into its cars.