Volvo has officially pulled the wraps off the EX60 at a launch event in Stockholm, and the company’s CEO came out swinging. Hakan Samuelsson told journalists that Volvo is ahead of other legacy automakers in developing a true software-defined vehicle, and offered a pointed “good luck, the rest of you” to competitors still trying to figure it out. It is the kind of confidence you only tend to project publicly when you have spent years getting burned in private.
The Volvo EX60 is the electric successor to the XC60, which has shifted over 2.7 million units since its 2008 debut and remains the best-selling Volvo ever made. Replacing it with something that actually works is not a small ask.
The numbers Volvo is leading with
On the hardware side, the EX60 is arriving with specs that are hard to argue with. Volvo is promising a range of more than 500 miles on a charge, backed by 400kW charging capability. That last figure is particularly significant. At that rate, the car can recover up to 211 miles of range in ten minutes, which is the kind of number that makes the “but what about charging?” question a lot harder to sustain as an objection to EV ownership.
The Volvo EX60 runs on the company’s HuginCore computing platform, named after a Norse bird, and built around hardware from Nvidia and Qualcomm Technologies. It runs Android Automotive and will be the first car to ship with Google’s Gemini AI assistant integrated from the start, rather than bolted on via an update later. Volvo says this combination enables ultra-responsive infotainment, advanced driver assistance, and lays the groundwork for higher levels of autonomous driving capability down the line.
The software story is where things get interesting
Volvo’s Chief Strategy and Product Officer Michael Fleiss was direct about what Volvo has actually achieved with the EX60 compared to the competition. According to Fleiss, Ford tried building a software-defined vehicle and stepped back from it. Volkswagen has been trying and, as of this launch event, has not got there yet. Volvo, he said, has managed it, though he acknowledged it took “some time” and was not a smooth ride.
That admission is worth sitting with for a moment, because the EX90 story is not a flattering one. Volvo’s flagship seven-seat SUV launched without the computing power needed to actually run the LiDAR-based safety systems it was marketed on. Early owners dealt with bugs, software gremlins, and recalls. In some cases, Volvo replaced cars entirely. A later software update addressed the quality issues, but the trust damage from those early months was real.
The LiDAR chapter is effectively closed now. Volvo has terminated its contract with LiDAR supplier Luminar, and neither the EX60 nor the updated ES90 will feature the technology. Whether camera and radar can fill that gap in the long run is a question the company will have to answer through real-world performance rather than press event confidence.
Catching up versus staying ahead
Samuelsson’s “good luck, the rest of you” line is quotable, but the Volvo EX60 is entering a market that has not been sitting still. The BMW iX3 is coming with a claimed 500-mile range and a heavily updated technology stack. The Porsche Macan electric has earned strong reviews. Tesla’s Model Y remains the volume benchmark against which every compact electric SUV gets measured, whether the other manufacturers like it or not.
The XC60 hit 2.7 million sales over 17 years by being a dependable, well-rounded car that people trusted. Replicating that record with the EX60 means the software confidence Volvo is projecting right now needs to survive contact with actual customers, software updates, edge cases, and the kind of long-term ownership experience that press launches cannot simulate.
The ingredients are there. The range figure is serious, the charging speed is genuinely impressive, and a clean software-defined architecture built on a single coherent computing platform is something most legacy automakers are still fighting to achieve. But the EX90 taught Volvo a hard lesson about the gap between what a car can theoretically do and what it reliably does in the hands of people who paid real money for it.
Getting that right with the EX60 matters far more than the CEO’s one-liners, however entertaining they might be.
