On Monday morning, I spoke to a Volvo EX90 owner who reported a litany of issues with her 2025 EX90: malfunctioning phone-as-a-key functionality, a useless keyfob, a keycard that rarely worked quickly, constant phone connection issues, infotainment glitches and error messages. I was surprised not because I hadn't heard of these kinds of problems, but because I experienced them myself over a year ago at the EX90 first drive again. At the time, Volvo said software fixes were imminent.

Today, we know the issues go deeper. To solve them, Volvo announced on Tuesday that it will replace the central computer of every 2025 EX90 with the new one from the 2026 EX90. It's a tacit admission that the company can't solve the EX90's issues while simultaneously launching its next-generation software-defined vehicles, and that it's easier to replace the original computer than to build bug-free software for it. But for some, the damage to the Volvo brand has already been done.

"I say without exaggeration that this car is a dumpster fire inside a train wreck," InsideEVs reader and EX90 owner Sally Greer told me via email. Greer tipped me off that Volvo would be replacing the computer in her 2025 EX90, and the company later confirmed that the replacement unit is coming to all EX90s. The new computer is a Nvidia Drive AGX Orin-based core computer with over 500 TOPS (Trillion Operations Per Second) of power, which Volvo says will help power its autonomous driving ambitions.

The EX90 already had a LIDAR sensor and a broad camera array, though the former sensor is not currently used in any driver-assistance logic. The hope is to eventually enable autonomous driving with LIDAR, radar and cameras working together. But hopes of quick progress toward that goal were partially dashed by the number of software issues in the initial EX90, forcing Volvo to allocate more resources toward fixing existing software issues, not just focusing on future improvements.