There is a glaring issue with the exterior, however: the lidar hump at the top of the windscreen. Volvo knows this is a problem, and I know this for two reasons. First, if you look at the raft of official press images of the car you’ll see many shots of the EX90 for nearly every angle possible expect in profile. I did find one profile shot, but the car is so far in the background that the hump is tiny, which is no doubt intentional. Up close it does indeed look like an unlit taxi sign. Second, I asked a Volvo designer at the brand-hosted launch if the team had problems dealing with the hump as we stared at it jutting out of the roofline, and they reluctantly confirmed they did.
Still, that lidar does boost the car’s already formidable safety. The company claims this is the safest Volvo ever, as the sensor array is able to build a complete picture of the world around the car, picking out even small objects hundreds of meters away, be it night or day.
Even though this tech makes the EX90 capable of autonomous highway driving, Volvo is not switching this capability on yet, and Thomas Broberg, senior technical adviser for safety at Volvo, won’t say when it will. “It’s more about what the car shouldn’t do rather than what it will do,” Broberg tells me. He adds that Volvo needs more time to test its Level 3 self-driving tech, but then confesses the company has been testing this system, or versions of it, for years now. Early next year the EX90 will allow supervised driving 2.5, apparently, but until then all drivers will be just collecting data for Volvo.
One final important point on the lidar hump. At the launch, I chatted with the representative from Luminar, the company that makes this unsightly self-driving component. He tells me the next generation of the tech is half the size and that Luminar is working on fitting it into a windshield rather than letting it sit proud on top. This sounds much better, and you can expect to see it in cars as soon as 2026 or 2027. Sadly, Volvo would not confirm whether it was going to upgrade the EX90 to this coming lump-free lidar. Let’s hope so.
Lux Interior
Speaking of radar, there’s one inside the EX90, too. It’s to stop children or dogs being left inside by mistake, as well as all the driver monitoring and assistance systems you’d expect from a Volvo. This is a very good thing, because such is the plush nature of the EX90 interior (the convincing Nordico “leather” trim is in fact made from secondhand plastic and sustainable pine oil), you would not want to leave unsupervised pets and kids to ruin the optional middle-row captain’s seats or the cavernous trunk, which has a very handy “Will It Fit?” pictorial chart, including a washing machine, chairs, skis, and a fridge, that lets you see what stuff can be crammed into the acres of rear space.
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