Volvo’s Future: A Unified Tech Platform
In a pivotal move, Volvo Cars revealed its innovative approach to technology at its recent Capital Markets Day in Gothenburg, Sweden. This new strategy, centered around the ‘Volvo Cars Superset’ tech stack, signifies a significant shift, promising to optimize the development and improve the quality of the brand’s electric vehicles. Beginning with the EX90 and extending to all future electric models, Volvo will leverage a single core of cohesive systems, modules, software, and hardware.
This Superset tech stack will act as a comprehensive foundation, incorporating all the necessary modules and functionalities for the brand’s future product lineup. It will function akin to a set of building blocks, offering a range of configurations. Each new car will be a carefully curated selection, or subset, of components drawn from this overarching tech stack. Volvo intends to continuously refine and improve the technology stack over time.
“The Volvo Cars Superset tech stack is a true game changer: it allows all of our engineering effort to be channeled into one single direction that powers all our products, instead of working on specific car projects,” explained Anders Bell, Chief Engineering & Technology Officer at Volvo Cars. “Our engineers will work on one superset, constantly improving, growing and expanding its capabilities and features. This allows for dramatically improved quality, increased speed-to-market and continually better cars for our customers.”
Closed-Loop Development and the SPA3 Platform
The Superset tech stack is core to Volvo’s goal of delivering a diverse product range under one unified brand identity. The company is also transitioning to closed-loop development leveraging data, connectivity, software, and core computing systems. This shift is as significant as the move towards electrification and affects all areas of the car’s electrical systems. Real-time data coupled with powerful onboard computing will allow Volvo’s engineers to improve all facets of its cars.
One of the key building blocks for Volvo’s future vehicles is the electric technology base, comprised of the latest propulsion, electronic and electrical systems. As part of this, Volvo is developing the new electric technology base, SPA3, which will be underpinned by the Volvo Cars Superset tech stack. The all-electric EX60 midsize SUV will be the first car to be built on the SPA3 platform.
SPA3 builds on the foundation of SPA2, including several key upgrades. It will feature improved core computing capabilities, enabling enhanced performance and feature enhancements through the tech stack. Crucially, the SPA3 architecture is designed to be vastly scalable, which means that the company could potentially build cars of any size using the same core technology. For example the same tech could be utilized in a SUV larger than EX90, or smaller than the EX30.
This modularity and upgradeability will result in reduced investment costs and lower variance, in relation to sales. This, in turn, is expected to improve future cash flow.
Impact on Production Costs
Utilizing a scalable SPA3 architecture will create enhanced synergies and increased technological efficiency across core computing, battery integration, e-motors, megacasting, and modular manufacturing. These efficiencies are all key to achieving substantial cost reductions in the production process.
Volvo Cars’ Torslanda plant offers and example of the brand’s approach to future manufacturing, with all the necessary capabilities for vehicle production located in a single area. The approach becomes more powerful when key components are reused across vehicles built using the SPA3 platform. This leads to lower complexity and higher flexibility.
