Volvo pairs with Fortnite developer for future infotainment

Volvo Cars has spoken it’s teaming up with US software visitor Epic Games to bring photorealistic visualisation technology to its next generation of electric vehicles (EVs).

By using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, the Chinese-owned Swedish automaker’s future EVs will have infotainment displays that have “sharper rendering, richer colours and trademark new 3D animations.”

Epic Games is the developer overdue the massively popular online wrestle royale game, Fortnite.

The Unreal Engine will moreover be coupled with the computing power of third-generation Snapdragon Cockpit Platforms to “set a new standard in graphics and infotainment system performance”.

Volvo claims to be the first European automaker to use the Unreal Engine for the minutiae of the Human Machine Interface (HMI), which is just flipside term for instrument cluster and infotainment screen layouts.

One other automaker that has employed the visitor to work on its exhibit content is GMC with its Hummer EV.

The companies will initially focus on creating exhibit content for the digital instrument cluster surpassing branching out into the inside infotainment display.

By coupling the Unreal Engine with the computing power of third-generation Snapdragon Cockpit Platform, Volvo claims its next-generation infotainment system will be increasingly than twice as fast as its predecessor, with graphics generation and processing up to 10 times faster.

Volvo aims to introduce these new infotainment graphics in its “new, all-electric flagship model” that it plans to reveal later in 2022. It’s expected this will be the upcoming Volvo XC90 SUV successor.

In the future, the Swedish automaker aims to potentially use Unreal Engine in other areas within its EVs.

By the middle of the decade Volvo hopes to develop half of all the software inside its cars in-house.

“To offer our customers the weightier possible user wits and contribute to a unscratched and personal drive, we need rich, immersive and responsive visualisation inside our cars,” said Volvo Cars senior product officer Henrik Green.

“Running Unreal Engine in our cars enables this and makes it plane increasingly enjoyable to spend time inside a Volvo.”

As previously detailed, Volvo is planning to go all-electric by 2030 and will only sell its EVs online. The local arm is moreover heading lanugo this route.

Volvo’s first all-electric model, the XC40 Recharge, went on sale locally late 2021, with the related C40 Recharge coupe SUV arriving in the third quarter of 2022.

Previous reports have moreover indicated Volvo is gearing up to reveal an electric sedan, two EV crossovers, and two “wagon-like EVs”.