Credit: Aurich Lawson

Next week, Volvo shows off its new EX60 SUV to the world. It’s the brand’s next electric vehicle, one built on an all-new, EV-only platform that makes use of the latest in vehicle design trends, like a cell-to-body battery pack, large weight-saving castings, and an advanced electronic architecture run by a handful of computers capable of more than 250 trillion operations per second. This new software-defined platform even has a name: HuginCore, after one of the two ravens that collected information for the Norse god Odin.

It’s not Volvo’s first reference to mythology. “We have Thor’s Hammer [Volvo’s distinctive headlight design] and now we have HuginCore… one of the two trusted Ravens of Oden. He sent Hugin and Muninn out to fly across the realms and observe and gather information and knowledge, which they then share with Odin that enabled him to make the right decisions as the ruler of Asgard,” said Alwin Bakkenes, head of global software engineering at Volvo Cars.

“And much like Hugin, the way we look at this technology platform, it collects information from all of the sensors, all of the actuators in the vehicle. It understands the world around the vehicle, and it enables us to actually anticipate around what lies ahead,” Bakkenes told me.

HuginCore is actually Volvo’s second-generation software-defined vehicle platform, one that incorporates hard-learned lessons from cars like the EX90. “The transformation that we did to really becoming a tech company that has control over its own stack—so hardware and software… I can’t lie. It’s been a tough journey. So the EX90 has been a tough journey to get it to launch. And we also had some issues in the beginning, and the learnings that we took from it, we actually brought into what we’re doing with EX60,” Bakkenes said.

Scalable Product Architecture 3

Good news for existing Volvo owners: The arrival of the platform (called SPA3) and HuginCore doesn’t mean your SPA2 Volvo is going to be abandoned.

“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.

“If you don’t know exactly where you want to go, you can give vague destination settings; if you want to play a song that you vaguely remember who did it and it was about something, you can talk about it in natural ways and it will actually help you find what you’re looking for, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Bakkenes said.

The AI agent knows exactly what car it’s in and has access to all of Volvo’s manuals and resources, as well as the greater Internet. It knows how to use the car and can explain it. “I want to understand how I share my digital key. I can open up a manual or something, but I can actually just ask, how do I share my digital key to a friend or to a valet? Or how do I charge? How do I open the charge lid? How do I do this, et cetera? And it just knows all of these things. So you can converse around it without going through the thick manual,” he explained.

Bakkenes shared examples of using the AI agent to find out if a particular model of TV was in stock at a nearby store, and whether it would fit in his car. You can tell it to remember a location, which it can correlate to appointments in your calendar and suggest directions. Another mode, called Gemini Live, sounds really quite useful.

“I’ve actually used it in the morning to get information about collecting Reddit feedback, so summarizing Reddit feedback from last week’s feedback on our product, for example. And when I get to work and I open up Gemini, I have the transcript of the discussion, so I can actually pick up there and keep the context. It also keeps context,” Bakkenes said.

If that works as described, it sounds like quite the productivity boost—one I’ll test out by seeing if it helps me write my notes for the EX60 when (if) I get to drive it later this year. Given that it knows everything about the EX60, I even suggested that Volvo have the AI agent give the product briefing during the first drive—we’ll see if the company takes me up on that in time.