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.