Volvo ES90 Represents A Significant Jump In EV Range, Charging, And Performance And The Car Looks Pretty Good Too Thanks To NVIDIA And Qualcomm Tech

This month, Volvo released their ES90, which has Decent Range, impressively low charging times, and decent power. My wife drives a Volvo SUV, and before she saw her car in person, she said she’d never be seen in a Volvo, let alone own one. Then, after seeing her XC 60 recharge, she fell in love. We bought it in black and wrapped it in purple, and it draws positive comments almost every time we drive it. Today’s Volvo is nothing like yesterday's. 

But the ES90 EV is a step ahead.

ES90 Range, Power, And Performance

The Volvo ES90 is an impressive platform with around 435 miles of range (typically anything over 300 miles is considered ideal), and up to 675 HP and 635 lb-ft of torque. It uses NVIDIA’s ADAS system, which is considered one of, if not, the best in the market. What makes the NVIDIA system so good is that NVIDIA uses Omniverse, their metaverse training platform, with their technology allowing them to do years of testing in hours and resulting in a far more complete, particularly when it comes to self-driving, solution.

Depending on the car's configuration (lower-spec models have less power), 0-60 times range from a respectable 5.3 seconds to an impressive 3.9 seconds (my old Jaguar F-Type V8 was just slightly faster, and it was a performance sports car, while the ESX90 is a large Sedan). Charging speed, depending on configuration, is 300 or 350 KW, which is towards the high end of fast charging.

Cool Features

The car has an electrochromatic sunroof, also often called smart glass, which can electronically adjust transparency on the fly. This is a really cool feature that will impress people who see it in person. (I’ve been looking to replace the windows, well, some of them in my house, with smart glass, and it's harder than you might think.)

They are using the Qualcomm Snapdragon system, I’ve had in the car entertainment in other cars I’ve owned. It's fast, relatively easy to use, and, as you’d expect from Qualcomm, does a fantastic job with smartphone connectivity. (I wish car companies would more aggressively market who’s tech they are using because they could better determine if that tech were good for you, both NVIDIA and Qualcomm do an excellent job with infotainment, with NVIDIA being better with graphics and Qualcomm with connectivity.)

Wrapping Up:

The ES90 is an impressive EV. While it is a sedan, not an SUV (I prefer SUVs), it has a decent set of core features, is good-looking, and promises to compete well in the market. Given past Volvo pricing practices, the car is expected to cost around $70K to start and likely will top out short of $90K.

It looks a lot like the similar and higher-end Polestar 2, which isn’t a bad thing as that is also a nice-looking car. (If they let you get your Polestar serviced at a Volvo dealer, I’d likely be driving one of those.)

This is a great effort by Volvo. Since we love our XC 60 Recharge (which has been painless to own), my wife’s next car may very well be a Volvo ES 90.

Rob Enderle is a technology analyst covering automotive technology and battery developments at Torque News. You can learn more about Rob on Wikipedia, and follow his articles on Forbes, on X, and Linkedin.