The Volvo Concept Recharge heralds a new era for the brand, and maybe for the industry—one in which platforms are engineered for evolution. Lots of cars offer over-the-air software updates to keep customers engaged in, and in love with, their vehicles. But in the fast-moving automotive future, keeping a car’s technology current will require more than just freshened code. So Volvo envisions planning and packaging its cars with an expectation of periodic hardware updates as well. Volvo’s chief executive officer Håkan Samuelsson said, “If a car is to live for, let’s say 10 years, I don’t see computing hardware living that long. If you could upgrade maybe after half that time, you could give the car even more functionality in the last five years.” The sentiment was echoed by Mickey Kataria, the director of product management at—Volvo’s electrical architecture partner—Google. “I think we’ll have to introduce some notion of hardware upgradability,” adding this bit of context: “People a...
Comments