The Volvo XC60 is the Swedish automaker’s best-selling car globally. It racked up nearly quarter of a million sales in 2023 and for Volvo, the natural progression in the XC60 line-up is an all-electric version.
The company may have delayed its 2030 electrification plans, but it said going fully electric remains the ultimate goal. Its entire future product line-up is battery powered and the EX60 will have a huge role to play in helping Volvo decarbonize.
As InsideEVs found out at Volvo’s Capital Markets Day in Sweden earlier this month, the EX60 won’t just be an electric alternative to the XC60, but would spawn an entire new generation of platforms and technology.
Volvo EX60 SPA3 Platform
Volvo
“The EX60 will be our first car model based on SPA3—the next generation of our SPA architecture and a step function change from SPA2,” Erik Severinson, Volvo’s chief product and strategy officer said.
The newly launched EX90 SUV that InsideEVs recently reviewed rides on the SPA2 platform. The EX60, thanks to the SPA3 platform, will feature 93% efficient motors, an improvement from 91% on the current motors and 85% on the previous versions.
SPA3 will also underpin more EVs that come after the EX60. Volvo’s Chief Technology Officer Anders Bell said during the CMD presentation that the platform is highly scalable, meaning it can underpin cars bigger than the EX90 and smaller than the EX30.
More importantly though, it will feature structural battery packs—something Tesla started years ago—and the packs themselves will be equipped with new high energy density cells.
What About Volvo EX60’s Software?
Volvo calls its next-generation technology platform “Superset.” It’s basically a standardized set of modules, software and hardware that all future Volvos will come equipped with.
In Volvo speak, they’re “large blocks like vehicle architecture, electric and electronic systems and smaller blocks of individual software and AI applications as well as mechanical components.”
The EX90 is already equipped with a “subset” of this technology platform. It features the Nvidia Drive Orin system on a chip (SoC), capable of 250 trillions of operations per second (TOPS).
All of this helps cars improve their ADAS features and gather data for future autonomous driving capabilities. The EX60 will feature Nvidia’s Drive Thor SoC, which would be capable of a whopping 1,000 trillions of operations per second.
During a roundtable with reporters at Volvo’s headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden, Volvo’s Chief Technology Officer Anders Bell said the new technology stack can help with autonomy, but it’s not rushing against time to do that. Instead it will use its AI-powered supercomputer clusters to improve its safety systems.
“Thor is capable of up to four times as many operations per second as Orin, while significantly reducing the energy consumption and improving the efficiency of the vehicle,” Bell said.
“We will offer Thor in different versions—lower performance versions for the base needs and higher performance for customers that want more advanced driver assistance systems and eventually autonomous driving.”
Volvo EX60 Features
Volvo
The EX60 will likely feature a future version of the Google infotainment available on the EX30, EX90 and the refreshed 2025 XC90.
The infotainment upgrades are pretty significant on these new models. The most common apps and controls, like maps, media and phone are presented on the home screen itself. This is meant to take fewer taps on the screen to open a particular app or function. Your main apps can be added to a contextual bar at the bottom of the screen.
Bell said Volvo was listening to customers and the shift was “not only to a data-driven product, but data-driven decision making and data-driven improvements of every aspect, both optimizing and deleting stuff that’s not appreciated or not used.”
Volvo EX60 Price, Production And Availability
Volvo Cars main plant in Torslanda, Gothenburg is where the EX60 will be manufactured.
The EX60 will be manufactured at Volvo’s main plant in Gothenburg, Sweden. I asked Severinson about the exact release timeline, but he declined to comment on that. Some outlets are however reporting that it will be launched sometime in 2026.
Volvo has been clear that it’s not trying to be a volume brand. It’s very much a premium carmaker, so expect pricing to be commensurate with that. For reference, the current gas-powered XC60 starts at around $47,000 in the U.S., before taxes and fees. The Tesla Model Y starts at $45,000.
Expect Volvo to target that price bracket, or even go slightly higher given all the techno-wizardry that the EX60 is expected to debut.
