2025 VOLVO EX90 FIRST DRIVE REVIEW: PROMISING BUT INCOMPLETE

The Volvo EX90 has the foundations of an exceptional electric luxury SUV. But there's a reason I wouldn't recommend buying one yet.

The Volvo EX90 will be a great, comfortable, refined luxury SUV; I’m sure of it. It’s quiet. Beautiful. Spacious. Classy. But it is also a work in progress, and I can’t recommend you buy one yet.

Volvo still has too much work to do to get its new flagship all-electric SUV in fighting shape to where it can build on the legacy of the XC90, the car that made modern Volvo what it is today. What you see here does represent the future of Volvo, so I'm eager to see what it can do one day when it's completely dialed in. 

(Full Disclosure: Volvo put me up in a fancy hotel in Newport Beach, California and fed me lots of good food during the first drive event for the EX90.)

What Is It?

That will disappoint anyone who has followed the EX90 story for long. Volvo first revealed the all-electric, seven-seater flagship in November of 2022, with full specs released in January 2023 for a proposed early 2024 on-sale date.

But Volvo had to delay the launch. Believers hoped that’d give Volvo time to finish it, to avoid the software struggles of early EX30s. As I’ll explain later, that hasn’t panned out. There are still missing features—as we’ve known about for a bit—and software issues that first reared their heads during the first-drive event.  

But the EX90 is clearly what's next. The Swedish brand has been ambitious about electrification, and, though it has joined countless other automakers in scaling back its plans this year, it still comes across as completely sincere in its drive toward an all-electric future. It sells a plug-in hybrid or electric option in every segment where it competes, and this is the next step in that plan.

The EX90 is built on an electric-only architecture, a departure from previous U.S.-market Volvo EVs like the XC40 Recharge and C40 Recharge, which were adapted from their gas-powered counterparts. It shares more with the Polestar 3 than any gas-powered Volvo.

It also debuts a new Google Built-In infotainment setup, a revised interior design, a beautiful new styling direction and—in the long term—plenty of new features for the brand. It’s a big swing in a hotly competitive segment. If Volvo can make its three-row family EV a hit, it’ll get an early lead in a segment that’s crucial to the U.S. market.

And it’ll do so with an SUV that’s built in South Carolina, too.

What Are The Volvo EX90's Specs? 

Volvo offers the EX90 in Plus and Ultra trims, with Twin Motor and Twin Motor Performance powertrain options for each. Pricing starts at $79,995 for the Twin Motor Plus, not including a required $1,295 destination fee.

Despite the base model sliding in under the $80,000 price cap for the federal clean vehicle tax credit, Volvo says it won’t qualify for any credits for buyers. As with all EVs that don’t qualify, however, you can still get the credit if you lease rather than purchase. 

 

The Ultra trim pricing starts $84,640 with destination and includes air suspension, massaging front seats, 21” wheels, laminated rear windows (for quietness) and soft-close doors. You also need to step up to the Ultra trim to get the Dolby Atmos-compatible Bowers & Wilkins 25-speaker audio system. My loaded $94,640 tester had it, and it was awesome.

All EX90s come with a 111.0-kWh lithium nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) battery, 107 kWh of which is accessible. It can propel the nearly 6,000-lb EX90 for up to 308 miles on the EPA cycle and accept up to 250 kW of charging power.

Speaking of which, the base Twin Motor EX90 makes 402 horsepower and 568 lb-ft of torque. If you want more power, you’ll have to spend an extra $5,000 to get the Twin Motor Performance version of either trim. That bumps power to 510 hp, while torque rises to 671 lb-ft. Volvo says it’s good for a 0-60 sprint of 4.7 seconds.  

What’s Good

You can skip all the numbers and describe the power in a word: Plentiful.

I only drove the Twin Motor Performance version, but I can’t imagine springing for it. I never had to use more than half throttle, and there’s not much joy in pushing a three-row family hauler to the limit. If you’re so inclined, you’ll find that the torque-vectoring rear axle makes the EX90 surprisingly sprightly on corner exit. I could feel it shuffling its power to the outside wheel and slingshotting me out onto the straightaway.

But that’s hardly what this vehicle is for. Volvo’s chassis engineers know it. First and foremost, the EX90 is a big, cushy cruiser. While previous big-wheel Volvos often displayed a sharp edge to their ride on bumpy sections, the EX90 strides gently over rough pavement. It’s too stable and precise to call it “floaty,” but equally as comfortable as a bargey old Caddy. It rides exactly as a luxury SUV should, proof that Volvo’s chassis team had time to perfect the EX90’s air suspension. I’ll have to see whether the steel-springed Plus model feels as polished.

Yet I can say for certain that the Ultra is an exceptional luxury SUV. Not only is it perfectly damped, it’s also among the quietest cars I’ve ever driven. It’s Rolls-Royce good. Every journalist on the drive program remarked on how stunningly silent it was at highway speeds. Credit a 0.29 drag coefficient, laminated windows and Volvo’s attention to serenity. 

That carries throughout the cabin, which offers a nice, airy mixture of interesting materials, modern design flourishes and neat technology. Volvo’s new infotainment system looked and felt great on my drive, as did everything I touched.

Volvo offers both wool and “Nordico” animal-free leather-like seats, and both are interesting, premium-feeling alternatives to the drab black leathers you get in most luxury SUVs. I didn’t find the Nordico seating as nice as real leather, though, and its lack of available ventilation (at launch time, coming later) means it felt a little less cool. That’s no problem for me, though, as the wool seats are gorgeous, comfortable and cool.

What’s Bad

Given all that praise, it may be hard to imagine why I wouldn’t recommend buying one right now. Yet there’s an old trope in the automotive world that’s proving more true every year in the electric and software-defined vehicle era: Don’t buy the first model year. The EX90 is sadly a textbook example. 

Volvo delayed it in no small part to remedy software issues, and that work just isn’t done. Volvo admitted that its phone-as-a-key software was still being finalized, and it shows. Almost every test car—all production cars and not prototypes, mind you—failed to recognize their iPhone keys at times. I drove two cars, and both struggled multiple times. 

There’s a backup option to the Ultra-wide-band low-energy Bluetooth connection, at least, which uses the phone’s Near Field Communication (NFC) chip and a reader in the center console to detect it. But even that didn’t work one time.

According to multiple journalists at this event, one car on the first wave refused to start entirely until a technician came by with a laptop. The glitches would be more acceptable if phone-as-a-key was a backup to a keyfob, but it’s not. Volvo pitches it as the primary way to start the EX90. They offer a fob, but you have to pay extra. At the very least, the company should offer fobs to early customers as they refine the software.

Those early customers also aren’t getting all the features promised to them yet. Volvo says the EX90 will support Apple CarPlay, but it doesn’t yet. Wireless CarPlay will come via an over-the-air update, Volvo says.

Same with some of the advanced driver-assistance functions Volvo promised. The EX90 was also supposed to be a leap forward in Volvo’s automated safety technology. But the super clever features aren’t enabled yet.

The EX90’s cross-path intersection collision braking, automatic curve speed assist function and smart charging features—which will eventually allow the EX90 to balance your home’s energy usage and its own charging time for low energy prices—are all on the “coming soon” list. 

Volvo’s next generation of driver assistance tech was supposed to be enabled by its Lidar sensor, which uses lasers to 3D scan its environment. But the EX90’s sensor is currently in data collection mode, scanning its surroundings without actually affecting driver assistance functions.

Volvo says it’ll be used in the future to help the automatic emergency braking system, increasing visibility range, especially at night. Volvo even claims that the EX90 has all of the hardware necessary for unsupervised autonomous driving. We don't even get a projected delivery date here.

This is the problem with the EX90. It was supposed to herald the arrival of a new era of connectivity, driver assistance and safety. Yet the connectivity features are buggy—when it loses its data connection, for instance, it can struggle to regain it—and the switch to new software has delayed the implementation of expected features, like CarPlay. Phone-as-a-key is a better solution if you can get it perfect, but even a 5% failure rate is far too high. And the failure rate was much, much higher than that among the EX90s we sampled. 

Volvo has also alerted customers that early EX90s will have significant battery drain when parked. The company says the EX90 will lose 3% of its battery every 24 hours even when stationary. The phantom drain will stop after 72 straight hours as the car enters "deep sleep," but that means if you leave the EX90 at an airport over a long weekend you'll come back with 9% lower state of charge than when you left. You can probably tell what I'm going to say next: Volvo says this will be fixed via an update at a later date. 

While Volvo’s next-generation Pilot Assist function does get a lane-change-on-command feature, it’s less reliable than other systems I’ve used, and lacks the automated lane-change function you get in a Mercedes, Tesla or General Motors vehicle. Most worryingly, the driver monitoring system on the second EX90 I drove seemed to fail. Because it couldn’t detect me, it wouldn’t enable lane keeping. That’s a frustrating failure for a brand-new, delayed, nearly-$100,000 luxury car. 

While it's more than fair to give Volvo a little more credit than some startups with perpetual "coming soon" promises, I can’t recommend you buy a product based on what it might be later rather than what it is today.

Early Verdict

There is no fundamental flaw with the EX90. The opposite is true.

It is brilliant in its basics. It looks great, rides great and feels great. It feels fresh yet familiar, a step forward without forcing drivers to reinvent their routines. Yet I couldn’t escape the feeling of corners cut. Some are likely permanent—the annoying window switches, the enemy of a person like me who loves to put his windows down, for instance. But most are temporary, the result of unfinished software.

The phone-as-a-key system will surely be worked out. CarPlay will come. So, too, will a use case for that Lidar sensor, given how capable the technology is. Problems with engaging Pilot Assist or re-establishing a radio connection may be fixed with an over-the-air update, too, I suppose. 

That is my problem, though, not just with the EX90 but with its ilk. Too many companies in too many industries have gotten accustomed to launching unfinished products, assuming they’ll fix it with a software patch. On a $70 video game, it’s frustrating. With a $1,000 phone, it’s baffling. In a $94,000 SUV, it’s unacceptable.

So if you’re interested in an EX90, and its promise of serene emissions-free motoring, you’re just going to have to keep waiting. Wait until Volvo can polish the software, then buy the finished product. You shouldn’t spend $90,000 on a promise. 

As I mentioned earlier, this is becoming increasingly common in our new era of cars; just look at how many EVs from Ford, GM and even Tesla have evolved since their debut. I look forward to giving the EX90 a proper re-test too when it's finished doing the homework.

Contact the author: [email protected]. 

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Base Price	$81,290
As-Tested Price	$94,640
Charge Time	10-80% in as little as 30 minutes
EV Range	296-308 miles
Output	402 hp (Base) 510 hp (Performance)
Seating Capacity	6-7
Cargo Volume	Up to 74.4 cubic feet with seats folded (inc. under-floor storage)
Efficiency	2.86 mi/kWh (Observed, mix of highway and country roads)

2024-09-03T07:30:04Z dg43tfdfdgfd