For the EX60, Volvo is using cell-to-body technology, which means that the battery cells are placed straight into the body, so the outer casing becomes part of the stiffness of the body itself. Volvo claims this improves energy density by 20 percent, while reducing weight and taking up less space. Not many other manufacturers have gone down this road yet, but expect to see more doing so.
A new underbody, chassis, and suspension improves on the setup in the current EX90. Volvo is also very pleased with how it has used megacasting to make sections of the car, such as the entire rear underbody, as giant, single aluminum pieces with an 8,400-ton casting machine. This replaces around 100 separate parts with a single sheet of metal, and it makes the whole body structure stiffer and lighter. This is not novel to Volvo; Tesla and XPeng are using this same manufacturing technique in some EVs.
As with BMW and Jaguar right now, Volvo is keen to highlight the computing power of the EX60. Its Snapdragon Cockpit Platform uses the Nvidia Drive AGX Orin and a new Qualcomm 8255 CPU, making the EV’s “brain” capable of more than 250 trillion operations per second. It’s also the first Volvo to feature Google Gemini integration, again going toe to toe with BMW, which announced at CES in January that the iX3’s Intelligent Personal Assistant was powered by Amazon’s Alexa+.
Volvo’s Pilot Assist Plus means you can travel on highways at speeds of up to 80 mph while the system steers and changes lanes for you. But the driving assistance software is not “eyes off.”
Volvo invented the modern three-point seat belt back in 1959, so I’m particularly keen to see an entirely new version of this iconic safety tech revealed for the first time in the EX60: the world’s first multi-adaptive safety belt. Differing from the conventional system you know, this belt apparently uses real-time sensor data to adjust tension based on your body characteristics, the traffic conditions, and the severity of a crash.
