Why this car gives its creators terrible sleepless nights: 2025 Volvo EX90 breaks the mould like an Apple iPhone EV to tackle the Kia EV9 and coming Hyundai Ioniq 9

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling required about 50 months to complete; the Sydney Opera House needed 14 years; and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds needed almost a year, in an era when pop albums were churned out in weeks if not days.

All these endeavours blew out in time and expense, much like the new Volvo EX90’s very public and protracted gestation. Whether history will see it as a cornerstone in its field like the others mentioned above is still way too soon.

However, beyond the PR line of ‘software issues’ causing endless hold ups, we can reveal more of what has delayed a project as vital as Volvo Car’s first dedicated electric vehicle, built on a completely new and different architecture known as Scalable Product Architecture 2 (SPA2).

A box-fresh EV and a next-generation platform are mammoth tasks on their own – see resource-abundant Toyota’s struggle to keep pace in this field today – so Volvo’s decision to embark on both, even with parent Geely’s considerable budgets and assets, has been described by one senior Volvo engineer as a once-in-a-half-century event.

“This car is the first car that is designed from scratch to be an electric car in the Volvo world, so it looks very different and you need to learn new things and develop new things along the way,” revealed Volvo Car Corporation Business Program Manager for the EX90, Mårten Wahlstedt.

“And secondly this is the first car to have centralised computing, so it has a completely different electrical architecture than in any previous Volvo car. So where as we used to have the computing power very much distributed to different nodes of the car, everything is connected in a powerful core computer.”

The EX90, then, seems to feature a smartphone system-on-chip like circuit that integrates all the software components within a centralised brain. Like Volvo Cars was when it began this journey late last decade, we’re now deep in computer technology territory here.

Result? The full-sized luxury EV SUV's user experience is designed to be faster, broader, satisfying and convenient, while saving time and effort. It’s just that Volvo has needed more time and effort to achieve these goals. And there have been challenges at every step of the way.

“With the fact that we control the main part of the software ourselves, and we develop a large part of the software ourselves as well, it means we can control the functionality of the car and we can actually improve the functionality of the car gradually, and not through a dealership visit but over the air through a car that is always connected and has 5G capability,” Wahlstedt explained.

“(But) you need to know how to develop software and it’s basically a software recruitment process. You need to work quite differently if you’re to be a software-defined company your processes need to work in a different way if you’re only working with hardware.

“This is not a core program but Volvo’s response to a complete technology shift.”

According to the long-serving brand employee and one-time Saab product specialist, developing the EV architecture in this manner is a multi-faceted process that requires many new technologies to work in very specific yet lateral ways, so the usual, vertical top-down approach of developing a new model does not apply in the EX90’s situation.

“It’s a multi-layered work,” he said. “So, it’s been very difficult to say when did (development) start and when it will stop. Normally, if you have a top-hat project, you can say ‘Whoa, let’s start,’ and then five years later say ‘Whoa, here we are’.”

Wahlestedt defended the decision to delay the project, saying that it is best for everybody that the car would only be released when it is ready.

“As in any major technology shift, and we haven’t had a technology shift like this in I would say 50 years, of course there are parts that can be frustrating, when we used to know exactly what to do, and the old recipe is still not working.”

That said, Wahlestedt is confident that Volvo Cars is on the right path for electrification, and that the finished product will speak for itself once customer deliveries commence later this month in North America and elsewhere.

Australia is due to see its first EX90s sometime in the first quarter of next year.

“I think the conviction is that we are moving towards electrification, and we will see more and more EVs," Wahlestedt concluded.

"The exact pace – I think we have proven that we don’t know exactly what the pace of the transition will be – but that it will be a transition, and that this is the car we will need for the future."