Anders Bell points to his grey hair and laughs. Three years ago, it was still blond and curly, says Volvo’s chief engineering and technology officer. The remark is more than self-deprecating. It captures what Volvo has been through: five years of building a software-defined vehicle (SDV) from scratch, as a traditional carmaker, with no blueprint to follow and no supplier to call for the hard parts.

The EX60 is a mid-size all-electric SUV, unveiled in Stockholm in January 2026 and built on SPA3, Volvo’s new electric vehicle architecture. In April 2026, the first customer production car rolled off the line at the Torslanda plant in Gothenburg. It is the first built entirely on HuginCore, the company’s own computing platform.

S&P Global Mobility rates Volvo at Level 5, the highest category of software-defined vehicle capability, and it is the only manufacturer in the world to reach that level. Bell describes the journey with a vivid metaphor: Take a piece of charcoal, pressure test it enough until it becomes a diamond. Now we are polishing the diamond.

Hard Lessons Learned from Real-World Customer Experience

The EX90, the first car on the platform, had a rough introduction. Problems that automated testing had not caught emerged in the real world, and customers experienced them directly. It’s been a hard and painful journey, Bell says. I don’t mind if it’s hard and painful inside the company. It’s very unfortunate when it spills over to customers.

Developing its own computing platform also changed how Volvo works with suppliers. Traditional tier-one suppliers deliver complete electronic control units (ECUs), hardware and software as a single package. With HuginCore, Volvo developed its own zone controllers and integrates supplier software itself.

We don’t just take an ECU from Bosch that is ready, says Bell. We have to work with them, integrate their software on our zone controllers, so their system works and integrates through the car.

Product Releases Must Be Nothing Less Than Awesome

The practical reach of the single software master becomes clear in deployment. Volvo is currently rolling out one human-machine interface update to 2.2 million cars built as far back as 2020, bringing a standardised interface and Google Gemini conversational AI to vehicles that left the factory before large language models existed.

We had no idea in 2020 when we built those cars that we would, in 2026, roll out conversational AI on the same car, on the same hardware, says Bell. We didn’t know what an LLM was in 2020.

A software-defined product is never finished. There is always more to integrate, more functionality to add. But there is a moment when you decide it is good enough to release. Bell’s criterion is pragmatic: When you launch it, it must be freaking awesome. And at that moment, it is.

But development continues, and what feels groundbreaking today will feel dated in five years. That, Bell argues, is not a problem. It is the point. The goal is not just to satisfy customers at the moment of purchase, but to keep surprising them afterwards. The conversational AI now rolling out to cars built in 2020 is exactly that.

Volvo builds 20 complete software versions per day. Every four hours, the best candidate goes through full automated vehicle testing on rigs, around the clock. Customers receive one meaningful release per quarter. The required success rate across 2.2 million vehicles is 99.9% or better. Bell is precise about what that means: 0.1% of 2.2 million is still more than two thousand cars.

I would never dare to press the button on 2.2 million cars and just go, he says. Bell does not watch the 99.9%. He watches the 0.1%. And even within that fraction, there is a hard distinction. A failed update that can simply be retried: fine. An update that means you can no longer start the car: catastrophic.

Automotive Coding Skills Hard to Come By

The talent problem is structural, and Bell does not soften it. Automotive software engineering that we do now is basically a five-year-old discipline at scale. Everybody’s looking to hire leaders in software-defined vehicles. Well, there aren’t any.

That is not a complaint about the labour market. It is a description of a discipline that barely exists yet. Writing safety-critical code for a two-and-a-half-tonne vehicle under ISO 26262 functional safety standards is not the same as building consumer applications.

It’s not just like hiring software people into a car company. It’s not about knowing how to code. It’s about coding in the automotive context.

Volvo built that context itself. The toolchain, the testing infrastructure, the repository structure, the process for configuring one codebase across eight silicon generations and four factories: none of it came off the shelf. There was absolutely nothing when we started, Bell says. There’s no tier one that you can call and buy a solution. We had to create all of it ourselves.

Volvo’s software test centre in Gothenburg covers 25,000 square metres and cost around €26m. And even then, Bell’s most important lesson from the past five years is simply this: Start earlier. Do not underestimate how big this job is.

Focus on Project Pace and Preparation

For technology leaders outside the automotive sector, Bell’s core lesson is not technical. It is about pace and preparation. Breathe deep before you go in. Don’t try to do too much too quickly. Don’t put your project on an aggressive timeline for job one. Do the fundamental proof of concept before you commit to the product plan.

He also points to organisational size as a factor that is rarely discussed honestly. Volvo is, in Bell’s description, probably the smallest independent car development operation in the Western world. We’re big enough to understand the scaling you need. But we’re small enough not to be institutional, not to get stuck in committees.

That balance is difficult to replicate, but the underlying principle applies in any organisation where software transformation has to happen at speed, under hard constraints, with consequences that extend beyond the screen. In financial services, healthcare and critical infrastructure, the discipline is the same. We can’t look at anybody and say, ‘Hey, we should do that’, Bell says. We need to follow our own path and walk the path that nobody walked on before.

The diamond is not finished, but it is being polished. The journey from charcoal to diamond has taken five years, and Volvo’s approach to software-defined vehicles continues to evolve. With HuginCore, the company has established a foundation that allows it to update cars long after they leave the factory, reducing costs and improving customer satisfaction. The integration of AI and over-the-air updates marks a new era for the automotive industry, where software defines the driving experience as much as hardware.

Source: ComputerWeekly.com News