The Volvo ES90 Is Going To Have All The Technology

In a few weeks, we’ll get to see the Volvo ES90, the Swedish marque’s first go at a fully electric exec saloon. Set to rival the BMW i5 and the new Audi A6 E-Tron and set to be sold alongside the current hybrid S90, Volvo’s revealed some info on some of the tech the car will feature, and it’s safe to say it goes pretty much right over our heads.

At the core of the ES90 will be an Nvidia Drive AGX Orin operating system, which can apparently do 508 trillion operations per second. We checked, and that’s quite a lot.

Unsurprisingly, there is much talk of AI functionality, which will either interest you or cause you to sigh in despair and wonder why we keep having this stuff shoved down our throats without asking for it. In the case of the ES90, it’ll be powering some of the car’s safety systems.

Volvo’s also packing the ES90 with what it calls Safe Space Technology, which is designed to stop potential harm befalling anyone that even goes near the car. This will be provided by – deep breath – one lidar sensor (that’s the taxi light looking thing on the roof in these teaser images), five radar sensors, eight cameras and 12 ultrasonic sensors, all of which are set to combine to make sure everyone’s out of harm’s way.

What about actual car stuff? Well, we don’t know much yet, but the ES90 will be based on the same SPA2 architecture that underpins the seven-seat EX90 SUV as well as the Polestar 3. We imagine, then, that it’ll get some of the same dual-motor configurations as those cars do, although we wouldn’t be surprised to see an entry-level single-motor version either.

Volvo’s latest round of teaser images give us our best look yet at the ES90’s design, showing that it’s shifting away from a traditional three-box saloon profile and, as lots of other saloons are at the moment, gaining a more sloping, fastback-ish rear – not dissimilar to a stretched Polestar 2.

The overhead shot also shows some lighting elements running down the rear deck of the car – could this hint at the ES90 joining the Polestar 4 in ditching a rear windscreen (a trend that, to be honest, we’re a bit baffled by)? We’ll find out that and a whole lot more besides when the ES90 is revealed in full on 5 March.