Volvo to add car-to-car hazard warnings to three EVs

When one Volvo spots a large animal, a pedestrian, a cyclist, roadwork or an accident, the warning begins with a quiet digital handoff: the car’s sensors and cameras identify the risk, log its location and send it to Volvo’s servers. Other Volvo vehicles traveling along the same road can then receive an alert.

The system is coming to three electric vehicles: the Volvo EX90, ES90 and EX60. It relies on connected vehicle data from Volvo’s passenger-car fleet in Europe, the US and Canada, and differs from crowdsourced warnings in apps such as Google Maps and Waze because the cars themselves provide the signal.

There are still clear boundaries. The vehicle must be connected to the cloud, and the road must exist in Volvo’s map database. Volvo says its newer electric vehicles have plenty of computing power to handle the real-time processing requests.

The foundation is not new. Volvo has used connected safety technology since 2016 to warn about slippery roads, using steering, braking and acceleration sensors. It also alerts nearby vehicles when another car activates its hazard lights. Volvo says 1 million vehicles on the road today have connected safety alert capabilities, while traffic management centers and other vehicle brands can also receive its alert data.

So what changes in practice? A driver in one of the three electric vehicles could receive an earlier warning about a hazard detected by another Volvo farther along the same road, including risks that may be difficult to see in time. The benefit will depend on connected cars, cloud access and map coverage, and Volvo has not stated when the update will reach each vehicle.