Editor's letter: Software is the latest challenge for car makers

Computing muscle and software flexibility are central to Volvo's new EX90 – but it has proven tough to crack

Building cars is hard. Thousands of components must all come together to work safely and reliably, to create a product that meets all kinds of stringent legislation. Customers have to then want to buy it, and once you’ve sold it to them, you have to look after them, then anyone else to whom they might sell it. 

The era of electric cars is no exception, but even greater complexity is being added into the business of building cars through all the software that is needed with the rise of more active safety and automated driving functions.

Some car makers are using this as an opportunity to revolutionise the in-car experience, among them Volvo.

I spoke with Alwin Bakkenes, head of software engineering for Volvo, at the launch of the new EX90, the computing power and software capabilities of which are central to the story.

Bakkenes said that this push for more software in Volvo's cars is done with the firm's proud safety reputation at its core. More advanced software capability in Volvo "is really about how we make our products as safe as we possibly can".

He said Volvo was making full use of software-defined vehicles (SDVs) to chiefly further improve safety capability through over-the-air updates.

"Many car makers will talk about being over-the-air-capable but will only update the maps. We update the software on the ADAS control units, on every ECU in the car if we need to."

Bakkenes is excited about the new SPA2 platform on which the new EX90 is based and how it can improve and add safety features much quicker than in the past.

"It's a new era for us. We've built the infrastructure to take sensors' data, retrain our models and then feed them back into the vehicles so we can continuously update and improve the performance of the vehicles.

"Instead of improving products in a matter of years, as we did in the early 2000s, we've gone to months and now to weeks. For developers, it's even better, because they can iterate every day."

I ask Bakkenes whether 'software' is therefore too simplistic a word to describe such a broad array of functions and features in cars now, when a car's entire software capability can be dismissed as not being very good if the heater controls are too hard to find.

"Software is so much more than just a line of code. It's the software we write to actually build the machine. Our test automation, our integration machines, the things that enable our software developers to actually work with the collective software product: that is also part of it.

"Every car is connected. We have significant cloud infrastructure. We manage the network operators globally, which is also software. We have a mobile application that connects to all the cars. That's also software. There's a lot..."

So is building a software architecture harder than building a new four-cylinder engine family? Or just different?

"I'm not gonna say it wasn't hard, right? This was a tough journey, because it's a big transformation for a legacy car maker to become really good at software," Bakkenes answers.

"We've been so intentional about why we're doing this. We've been able to select which pieces we need to do ourselves and become good at and which pieces we continue to work with our suppliers on."

Lots of early talk about SDVs has been about taking the dozens of different ECUs that control different parts of a car's functions and centralising them onto one to make deploying updates easier and more robust.

However, Bakkenes said: "Personally, I don't think that the hunt for as few ECUs as possible is the most important thing. It's how you build something that's stable, creating something that allows us to manage different product variants as efficiently as possible."

The new EX90 follows the launch of the Volvo EX30 just under a year ago, a car that was criticised for its software in a broad sense, and the EX90 launch itself was delayed by software that wasn't ready on time.

Does such criticism hurt, particularly in the aforementioned context of specific issues undermining the car's entire software capability? 

"You should tell us about your observations," said Bakkenes. "It's up to us to make sure that we deliver a fantastic experience. If sometimes we get something wrong, we try to fix it. That's why we have over-the-air updates.

"Of course, we want to get it right the first time, but I don't think you're getting anything wrong if you think that the speed display was too small.

"Some cases, there might be a preference. Some cases, it might be for real. We need to address those and we do. And above all else, we listen to customers."