How Volvo is rethinking the infotainment system

[93Regina]

LOS ANGELES—Throughout the press and trade days at the LA Auto Show, most of the big car makers in attendance hold 30-minute press conferences on the show floor to unveil their latest car or announce new company strategies. Given the gearhead audience, it’s no surprise that most of these announcements focus more on horsepower and design than phone compatibility and computing power. But a few car companies are looking toward the future and switching things up.

Volvo was one of the few automakers to highlight its infotainment center and consoles in its announcement of the new XC90 seven-seat SUV. (Audi and Honda were the only other automakers of the ten-or-so announcements we attended that spent time extolling the virtues of its new cars’ interior tech.) That may be because Volvo is in a unique position to experience its “rebirth,” as one Volvo spokesman termed it. While many automakers are trying to reinvent themselves after a depressing decade, Volvo has new money from Chinese automaker Geely behind it after its former parent company Ford sold Volvo in 2010.

That new money bought changes that are just starting to appear in Volvo’s 2015-and-beyond lineup. The company poured resources into building a small but powerful three turbo engine, which you can read about here, as well as equipping its cars with adaptive cruise control and collision avoidance mechanisms that turn on if the car is going below 30 miles per hour.