Free software updates for cars are now the rule, especially for electric cars. Hardware changes, on the other hand, are not the same. Automakers don’t usually offer upgrades with legitimate parts unless there is a recall. Volvo and Polestar are now going in a different direction. They are giving customers who buy EX90 and Polestar 3 EVs a free upgrade to their supercomputer chips. The old chipset in Volvo will be swapped out for two brand-new Nvidia Drive AGX Orin processors, each of which can handle about 508 trillion operations per second (TOPS). Because it’s eight times stronger than current CPUs, it will help Volvo and Polestar give their electric vehicles much better AI-based safety features and the ability to drive themselves. They say that processing power is needed to fully use all the sensors and self-driving equipment that Volvo is putting in its cars. These include lidar, five radar sensors, eight cameras, and twelve ultrasound sensors. This hardware change is made possible by Volvo’s Superset tech stack, a single set of hardware and software technologies that work with all of its electric vehicles. As new technology becomes available, it’s easy to update old Volvos so they’re not stuck in the past. Volvo’s ES90 sedan is the first car to have Nvidia AGX Orin chips installed by the company. The Volvo ES90, which is their most high-tech car, will be out in a few weeks. But it won’t last long because Volvo is improving the Polestar 3 and the EX90, both of which have seven seats. Customers have to take their cars to sellers to get the upgrade, but when they leave, their cars will be much more advanced than when they came in, and they won’t have to pay a dime. All 2026 model-year EX90s and Polestar 3s will come with the new Orin chipsets already installed. However, present customers will not be left behind and will be able to enjoy the same benefits as people who just bought the device.
