Volvo EX90 designed to be safe, efficient, elegant

Volvo Cars revealed that the design of its upcoming EX90 all-electric sport utility vehicle (SUV) was created by its in-house Scandinavian team who worked together to make its flagship EV SUV an efficient family vehicle with a higher standard of safety than any Volvo car before it.

But efficiency and safety, the Swedish carmaker explained, should come at the price of elegance.

A good example is how Volvo Cars designed the exterior of the EX90. The Gothenburg-based brand gave the EV SUV a sleek and rounded front end. Combined with other aerodynamic elements such as flush glazing and door handles, the Volvo EX90 ensures that air flows uninterrupted towards the rear making the vehicle more efficient.

Because of its streamlined exterior, the Volvo EX90 achieves a drag coefficient of 0.29 — for the uninitiated, that’s considered a very competitive number for a large, seven-seater SUV.

“We’ve taken inspiration from yacht design to outline the Volvo EX90’s beautiful and sleek proportions. If you look at the front, it’s proud and confident – inspired by a sailboat’s ability to shear through the ocean’s slamming waves. But it’s also rounder overall, which enables the air to flow around the car more efficiently,” explained Volvo Cars Head of Exterior Design T. Jon Mayer.

Additionally, Volvo Cars seamlessly integrated the standard light detection and ranging (LiDAR) system in the EX90. LiDAR is a remote sensing system that uses a pulsed laser to precisely measure ranges. It can detect, for example, pedestrians up to 250 meters away.

“It was a design challenge to integrate lidar in a way that both looks good and is optimal for its safety applications. It’s the car’s eyes, and while you could have them around the grille area — which would be equivalent to having eyes on your knees — it makes much more sense to have them as high as possible on your head so you can see as much as possible. That is why, together with our engineers, we decided to integrate it in the roofline to maximize its effectiveness,” explained Mayer.

Thanks to these design choices, the upcoming Volvo EX90 becomes an elegant ride. Some of its stylish amenities include a panoramic roof, complementing the abundant glass used in the EV SUV’s Scandinavian-inspired cabin.

“We’ve put a lot of effort into the illumination inside the EX90, trying to create a warm interior and a somewhat colder expression for the exterior. It’s also connected to how people in Scandinavia might be perceived. There’s a calm and understated confidence that can read as cold at first — but once you get to know people, you find that they're really warm. That very same confidence is exactly what we’re trying to convey in the expression of our cars,” Mayer said.

Photos from Volvo Cars

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