Interview: Volvo’s engineering leader deals with generation batteries

Volvo Car Group

Software was one of the top five Replacement spaces introduced through Volvo Cars. His presentation of Capital Days in November 2024. The company’s plan for navigating a consistently evolving global is to move from a hardware-driven company to a software-driven company. The company also discussed a “tech stack of overnsembles,” which it unveiled in September 2024.  

Alwin Bakkenes, global manager of software engineering at Volvo Cars, says the tech battery is strongly connected to some of the attributes that describe trendy cars, such as safety, human-centric generation and visitor experience.

The SuperSet technical battery is a modular engineering platform that the company says will be used to build all vehicles in the long term. It enables Volvo Cars to make cars safer, more efficiently, and over time through software.

“Effectively, the superset tech stack is a true superset strategy,” says Bakkenes. This means Volvo can build small “B” class cars like the EX30 right up to premium “F” class cars like the EX90 in a scalable way.

Discussing the benefits, Bakkenes says: “Very often, corporations have an architecture for small cars and another for medium cars, have other physical arrangements in terms of electric motors or motors. But with a pile of generation of super -conjunctions, we have a Good.

In the past, car brands have followed a vertical integration of the vehicle structure, through which all parts of a car are delivered to the factory as custom-made modules that are then integrated. But brands now see the merit of the structure of the cars explained through the software.

Alwin Bakkenes, head of global engineering at Volvo Cars, says the move from bespoke platforms to a software-defined architecture means that instead of relying on vertical integration of components, vehicles are built based on capabilities. “All of the car’s sensors and actuators are exposed as APIs [application programming interfaces] on the core computing platform, where we can combine them into custom functions.”

This is how software begins to update physical hardware.

For example, as Bakkenes explains: “In classic vehicles, a front chamber formula would connect directly to a specific incorporated circuit of the [ASIC] application that is verified to assess whether or not the car demonstrates or not a caution of collision or not collision or automobilerity of a hand maneuver.

“What we [now] do is connect the front camera together with other cameras to our core computer platform, which means we can use it for different things.” As an example, he says the cameras could be used to implement sentry mode or a dashcam.

The camera can also paint with the integrated Google assistant of the car, which allows the force of the reason to request more data about anything that the camera has seen, such as locating the opening hours of a passing supermarket.

“They are the same sensors, but they are incorporated in an absolutely new way, which allows us to extract much more value,” he adds.

“While we build more cars relying on the Superset tech battery rather than custom platforms, it will give a contribution to our margins,” he adds. While the Superset Technologies stack underpins all of Volvo Automobiles’ upcoming cars, it converges all engineering efforts in a direction that runs on express and split car projects.

The Volvo Ex90 (pictured above) is the company’s first software-defined car, built on the SuperSet tech stack. It is founded on a centralized compute architecture the NVIDIA Drive Orin System-on-Chip architecture.

Nvidia Orin Orchestra Everything in the car, to feed the in -depth learning capabilities that underlie the active driving and active systems founded on the synthetic intelligence (AI) of Volvo, to attend the introduction of a long -term autonomous conduction and Offer a visitor to delight in the most productive class.

Instead of large steps between different generations of cars, Volvo Cars can continuously enhance the performance of each vehicle in its line-up simultaneously, with the same superset tech stack. It also enables closed-loop development, which allows Volvo Cars to reduce the time it takes to roll out new software features.

For example, with its ex90 model, Volvo began to gather knowledge of car fleets to habit of vehicles over time. “We can perceive if something is wrong by asking a fleet of cars to collect knowledge, for example, a safe intersection or in safe conduction conditions. We can use the raw knowledge we gather to recycle our knowledge models,” explains Bakkenes.

In effect, the closed-loop system, built on the superset tech stack, uses real-time data to improve product development. The data processing is powered by what Bakkenes says is one of northern Europe’s largest AI supercomputers.

Through its corporate software in complete composition, Zensect, Volvo is using the AI ​​IA supercomputing platform founded by Nvidia DGX to attend the expansion of autonomous driving. The corporate plans to use NVIDIA DGX systems, optimized for giant workloads, for existing and long education models, existing AI models and lengths, long, founded on the discharge of knowledge of the Volvo Automobile Fleet, driven on public roads.

To its strategy to make driving safer, Bakkenes says Volvo equips all its cars with 5G connectivity.

“With a superset technology stack, we effectively have a one-track implementation for our software and electronics stack, which is a lot more efficient”

Alwin Bakkenes, Volvo Cars

He says the cars use AI in a hybrid setup, which uses vehicle processing capabilities at the edge, as well as a cloud-based remedy connected to 5g.  

Through the association with Nvidia, he says that Volvo’s purpose is to equip each car and each car with “powerful silicon”, in which complex models of AI can be implemented that make the safer cars that he has ever built.  

Volvo has also been standardized in the Operational Formula of Google Automotive Android for its cars. “What Google provides us with is a very initial position for a solid infotainment formula and provides us with a way to integrate into a broader ecénula,” Bakkenes explains.

This means that Volvo not only uses Google Automotive as a complete application application to expand its own car applications, but also allows Volvo paintings with third -party expansters. For example, in Sweden, Volvo has been associated with parking application suppliers to integrate the application into the information and entertainment system. “It facilitates the delight of possessing and a Volvo car,” he adds.  

Google Automotive also provides Google Maps and Google Assistant for voice control, where the driver simply says “hey Google” and asks Google Maps to navigate somewhere.

Modern cars put a lot of emphasis on the infotainment system. Certainly, car reviews on the web often make a point of highlighting the shortcomings of these in-car systems. Bakkenes says that from a customer satisfaction, loyalty and preference perspective, a car’s infotainment system plays a very important role.

“It is not only a consultation of multimedia or radio readers, but how the car interacts with the pilot. The way in which this virtual event is in force when driving the car is incredibly important, “he said.

Over time, the infotainment system is used to add more functionality to the car, which, for Bakkenes, means Volvo Cars can improve the customer experience by updating vehicles that have already shipped based on the data it collects from the fleet of cars on the road. 

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