Volvo Will Update Your Car Every 3 Months for as Long as It Can

• Volvo is becoming a company centered around software-defined vehicles. 
• The Swedish automaker has been building vehicles capable of receiving over-the-air updates since 2020.
• Volvo plans on updating all of its cars — new and old — on a quarterly basis. 

For more than half a decade, Volvo has been shipping cars that are capable of receiving over-the-air updates. According to Alwin Bakkenes, the brand's head of software engineering, Volvo creates a superset of software (think of it like a master document) and tests it across multiple iterations of hardware. It's been doing this since 2020.

"It's not like we had hundreds of engineers sitting there coding the same thing to make it look the same, which remarkably, you'll find that this is what the industry does all the time," Bakkenes said. "It's the same code, the same implementation from the superset into the product-specific variant."

"In 2020, we had a certain chip from Intel with a certain amount of memory. Today, we have a much more powerful chip with much more memory, and yet we deploy the same software to both," he said. "We have to do rigorous testing and optimization to make sure that it fits, or that we configure this particular product variant, for example, to maybe not have this particular feature because of performance limitations, and we need to test that all the time." 

Ever wonder why a new software update makes your phone or laptop slower? It's because the software might not have been optimized for the device's old hardware. Volvos won't have this problem. 

If you own a Volvo, check back every three months or so. You might be surprised to find your car's screens have a whole new look, new features and even better software performance.