Volvo’s next flagship vehicle will be the Volvo EX90, an all-electric SUV in the mold of the current XC90 with more sensor technology than ever before seen on one of their production cars. Specifically, the company says “the EX90 to be the safest Volvo car to ever hit the road.” It’ll be a smart, computing-intensive car that’ll make decisions for you. This is consistent with Volvo’s mission and it’s only mildly disturbing that their way of convincing us to give over our cars to smart computers is to subtly invoke The Matrix.
The EX90 won’t debut until November 9th, but some of the details are included in a series of Shingy-esque press releases that include a lot of sections like “Understanding the human experience” and “a watchful guardian.”
Specifically, there’s stuff like:
So what can you expect in our new Volvo EX90? It’s a car designed to understand you and its surroundings to help keep you, your loved ones and others in traffic safe. It can also get smarter and safer over time, as it learns from new data and receives updates.
The development of our latest safety technology is based on understanding human behaviour, rooted in decades of our own and others’ safety research. Every one of us is likely to experience or be affected by at least one car crash in our lifetime.
That’s not a judgment: we know that most of the time you’re a great driver, alert and ready to act when needed. But we’re all humans, and that also means to experience emotions.
Emphasis mine. The press release goes out of the way to remind us that Volvo is made of people and not robots trying to bring about the end of human free will. This is maybe because the new LIDAR-equipped Volvo EX90 will have five radars, eight cameras, and 16 ultrasonic sensors. Very cool. Can’t wait to try it out.
It would be way less, creepy, though, if they didn’t share a video of little drone orbs forming a car and then forming a face in a way that’s pretty much exactly like the bad guy at the end of Matrix Revolutions.
Here’s the drone face:
The whole talking-in-a-computer generated background thing doesn’t help either.
Hopefully, the new vehicle doesn’t try to destroy humanity and turn us into dreaming Duracells and ideally it looks something like the Recharge concept:
Though, these leaked patent drawings seem to suggest something a little more low-key:
Either way, we’ll learn a lot more about the EX90 in a couple of months.