Volvo EX90 Software Issues: Why Building EV Software Is Harder Than Hardware | Taha Abbasi

Volvo EX90 Software Issues Highlight Growing Pains of EV Transition

Taha Abbasi examines the software challenges facing Volvo’s flagship EX90 electric SUV — a vehicle that promised to be the safest and most advanced Volvo ever built but has been hampered by software delays that pushed back deliveries and forced the company to ship vehicles with incomplete feature sets. The EX90’s struggles illustrate a broader industry pattern: building great EV hardware is hard, but building great EV software is harder.

The EX90 was announced in November 2022 with a planned launch in late 2023. Software development delays pushed initial deliveries into 2024, and early vehicles shipped without key features including the lidar-based advanced driver assistance system that was central to Volvo’s safety pitch. The lidar hardware was installed but inactive — a physical reminder of software promises not yet delivered.

The Core-Computer Architecture Challenge

As Taha Abbasi explains, Volvo designed the EX90 around a centralized computing architecture powered by NVIDIA’s Drive Orin platform. This represented a massive leap from Volvo’s previous distributed architecture (dozens of separate controllers) to a centralized system where a single core computer manages most vehicle functions. The hardware transition was successful; the software to fully exploit it has proven far more difficult.

This mirrors challenges across the industry. Volkswagen’s CARIAD software division has faced similar struggles with the ID series. Mercedes’ MB.OS platform experienced development delays. The pattern is consistent: legacy automakers can design centralized computing hardware but lack the software engineering culture and processes to develop, test, and deploy the complex software these systems require.

What Tesla Did Differently

Taha Abbasi notes the contrast with Tesla, which has been shipping software-defined vehicles for over a decade and has built an internal software culture comparable to Silicon Valley tech companies rather than traditional automakers. Tesla’s software team operates on rapid iteration cycles, deploying updates weekly and fixing issues in days. Legacy automakers’ software teams, constrained by automotive validation processes and supplier dependencies, often require months for similar changes.

The Customer Experience Impact

For EX90 buyers, the experience has been frustrating. Paying premium prices for a vehicle marketed on its advanced technology, only to receive it with key features disabled, erodes the brand trust that Volvo has carefully built over decades. As Taha Abbasi observes, in the software-defined vehicle era, shipping incomplete software is worse than shipping a vehicle with fewer hardware features — customers can see the dormant sensor on the roof and know they are not getting what they paid for.

Lessons for the Industry

The EX90 story is not unique to Volvo — it is the story of every legacy automaker attempting to become a software company. The transition requires not just technical capability but organizational transformation: hiring differently, managing differently, and shipping differently. Taha Abbasi emphasizes that automakers who cannot make this cultural shift will continue to deliver vehicles that look competitive on paper but disappoint in practice, ceding the software experience advantage to Tesla and EV-native companies indefinitely.

About the Author: Taha Abbasi is a technology executive, CTO, and applied frontier tech builder. Read more on Grokpedia | YouTube: The Brown Cowboy | tahaabbasi.com