Letter of the week

VOLVO HAS LOST ITS WAY

As a Volvo enthusiast, I read Jim Rowan’s interview (19 March) with an increasing sense of alarm. Acar is absolutely not an electronic device on wheels. What we do with our PCs, our smartphones and our cars are three separate things. I remember when, with Windows 8, Microsoft tried to make my PC like a smartphone: it was a disaster. Boeing recently tried to mask a poor mechanical design with a software patch and in the process cut the pilot out of the equation: it cost many hundreds of lives and nearly brought down the company.

EVs are still in their infancy; Volvo should take a leaf out of Lucid’s book and concentrate on motor efficiency, packaging and cool design. I suggest that creating a full stack of software from the silicon level up to the user interface is just plain wrong; what’s required is a discretised approach where functional safety is optimised between powertrain, chassis electronics, ADAS, infotainment and so on. This clear functional decomposition will ease debugging and improve reliability. I’d rather Bosch did my ABS modulator programming than Volvo.

Anyone who understands crash safety will be aware that a huge part of it is mechanical engineering. Take a look at Romain Grosjean’s terrifying Formula 1 crash in 2020: the astonishing mechanical engineering that saved his life was enabled by computer software running on powerful hardware, but the software itself was irrelevant in the moment of the crash. AI is not yet good enough to analyse the causes and come up with fixes. The last modern Volvo I drove – a bland, medium-sized SUV that could have come from any brand – tried to steer me into a concrete barrier in roadworks. I had to wrench the steering wheel back to save the situation.

Volvo needs to embrace cool design; celebrate its distinctive past; create cars with best-in-class safety; and be unique in embracing ergonomics to make the car easier to use with simple, clear, physical controls. It needs to remember that cars are machines for travelling in, more like a mobile house than a mobile phone.

Robin Hall Hall Engineering and Design