“Of course there are cars that go into maintenance at some point, but most of the fleet we have plans to follow the latest software baselines,” Bakkenes said. While he doesn't care whether HuginCore will be part of the midlife refresh process for SPA2 cars like the EX90, those SUVs do come equipped with the same powerful Nvidia Drive AGX Orin system-on-a-chip that's essential to making this all work.
“The core computing platform as such, even though we've made some changes to the EX60 and optimized it, a lot of it is actually similar to, say, SPA2. So there's a lot of code… We have what we call the superset tech stack. We have a superset of code and we configure manifest-based configuration to a specific hardware variant, which means we're actually deploying the same thing for, say, an SPA2 car and a SPA3 car, in terms of a lot of functionality,” Bakkenes said.
However, Nvidia isn't the only thing powering HuginCore. Qualcomm is another partner and supplies its Snapdragon 8255 SoC. Together, that “provides a lot of inference compute… and it's a flexible inference compute. So it allows us to develop AI-based algorithm models for self-driving, also for other tasks in the car, and do that flexibly. And as we do this, we're not only building a car that's great today, but we're also building the foundation with Hugin, a flexible computing platform that has access to virtually all the sensors and all the actuators in the car, so we can develop this over time.” he said.
Agentic AI
Volvo was an early adopter of Google's car services and is adding Gemini to the EX60 to give the car a true conversational AI assistant. I've long been in favor of good voice control systems in cars, but they have to be natural, and from the sounds of it they will be. Yes, you can use it to navigate to a specific address or play a specific song, for example. But you can also be a bit more vague. Despite 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.
