Volvo built a cabin around one screen — and the real design work is everything they refused to put behind it

The ES90 makes the dashboard's physical form almost incidental. Nearly every function now lives behind a 14.5-inch sheet of glass. Which means the few surfaces left — the wood, the wheel, the handful of switches — are no longer details. They are the entire brand, carrying a load they were never asked to carry before. The screen was the easy part. The discipline is choosing what stays physical, and that choice can only be judged as a felt thing, never as a feature list.

The inversion nobody quite said out loud

When Volvo revealed the fully electric ES90 on 5 March 2025, the headline spec was the architecture, not the styling. The press release titled it plainly: the car was "defined by software and built on our Superset tech stack" — one shared set of hardware and software modules meant to underpin every future electric Volvo, fed by dual NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin compute. The cabin followed the logic. A 14.5-inch portrait centre touchscreen "handling nearly all the car's functionality" (Motor1, 5 March 2025), a slim 9.0-inch driver strip, a head-up display, and — in Motor1's words — "aside from a few buttons on the steering wheel and switches for the windows, this is an entirely digital affair."

Read that sentence again as a design brief rather than a spec line. Almost everything that used to be a physical decision — the shape of a climate knob, the click of a drive selector, the texture of a volume dial — has been deleted into software. What's left is a short, deliberate list: some wheel buttons, the window switches, and the surfaces you touch but don't operate. That list is the whole game now. The interior design call has inverted. It is no longer "what do we add to the dashboard." It is "what do we refuse to digitize."

The screen is the cheap decision

This is the uncomfortable part for anyone who still thinks the big screen is the interior design. It isn't. A large portrait display is, at this point, a procurement and integration choice. Volvo's own framing tells you the screen is downstream of the platform: Superset is the product, the panel is an output of it. The same logic produced the EX30, where Volvo went further still — and where, tellingly, the company's stated philosophy was that "the most sustainable component is the one that does not exist" (InsideEVs, 13 November 2023), justifying the removal of the driver's instrument cluster entirely in favour of one central focal point.

That phrase is the whole thesis in six words, just pointed the wrong way. "The most sustainable component is the one that does not exist" is a manufacturing argument. The design argument is its mirror image: the most valuable component is the one you chose to keep. Once you can put anything behind glass, putting things behind glass stops being a decision. The decision is the refusal — the small set of gestures judged worth the cost of a real mechanism, real tooling, real tactility. Everything Volvo kept physical in the ES90 was kept on purpose, against the gravitational pull of "just put it in the screen."

What carries the brand when the function leaves

Strip the function out of the surfaces and the surfaces still have to do something. In a software-defined cabin they do the one thing software can't: they tell you, by feel, what kind of company built this. The ES90 leans hard on this. Reviewers consistently single out the real birch wood inlay on the dash, the Nordico upholstery (recycled and bio-based, from Swedish forests), the aluminium detailing — even Swedish flags etched into the metal trim, the kind of touch that reads "luxury limousine" rather than "executive saloon." None of those carry a function. All of them carry the brand. That is the load transfer: as operation drains into the display, identity and tactility concentrate into the handful of things you can still run your thumb across.

This is why the decision is so much harder than it looks. In a button-rich cabin, brand is distributed across forty surfaces and no single one has to be perfect. In a screen-defined cabin, brand is concentrated into maybe five surfaces, and each one is now load-bearing. Get the wood wrong and there is nothing else physical to hide behind. The fewer the gestures, the more each one has to be exactly right — which is the opposite of the cost-saving story usually told about going to one screen.

The evidence that restraint is a felt judgment, not a spec

If the physical short-list is the real design, then the proof that it's hard is in the reviews — because the ES90 is being marked down precisely where Volvo's refusal-list was too short. The pattern is unanimous across outlets. Top Gear and Autocar praise the materials and the calm, then flag the over-reach. The Irish Examiner's verdict (2 May 2026) is the bluntest: "Everything — from opening the glovebox, the sunroof blind, the door mirrors, and the climate control — are controlled via the massive portrait touchscreen. It's complete overkill and a massive pain," and on the steering column, "to adjust the steering wheel's fore/aft and up/down position, you have to access it through the central touchscreen, pretty much like everything else. It's not good." The conclusion: "The maddening characteristics on display here have a dramatic effect on its overall day-to-day user-friendliness," enough to cost it a star despite an interior the same reviewer calls exceptional.

Notice what that critique is not. It is not a spec complaint — the screen is large, fast, well-rendered, Google-built-in. It is a felt complaint. Adjusting a mirror through three menu taps while moving is a worse experience than a knob, and no feature list captures that, because on paper the function is present. This is the line DEPIX cares about: the quality of a software-defined interior cannot be evaluated by inventory. A list of "supported adjustments" scores the ES90 perfectly. The lived experience scores it four stars and irritation. The gap between those two is exactly the design decision — which physical gestures were worth keeping — and it is invisible to any process that judges interiors by counting features.

Why this is a Design-Intelligence problem, not a UI problem

The instinct, faced with the ES90 critique, is to treat it as a UI fix: bury fewer things, surface a few hard keys, ship an OTA update. But the call sits upstream of UI. Deciding the steering-wheel adjustment deserves a physical control — and the glovebox doesn't — is a judgment about which interactions are frequent, eyes-off, and emotionally load-bearing, versus which are rare enough to live in a menu. That is a design-intelligence question: it weighs human behaviour, brand intent, and the felt cost of a wrong call, and it cannot be answered by the team that owns the screen because the screen will always argue for absorbing one more function.

And it has to be judged before the tooling is cut. A physical control is expensive and permanent; deleting it into software is cheap and reversible-looking. So the structural pressure always runs one way — toward the screen — and the only counterweight is a deliberate, defended short-list of gestures someone has decided are non-negotiable. The market is already pushing back. In the same week this report was written, DEPIX CEO Philip Lunn flagged exactly this on LinkedIn — "Insight into the trend to go more analogue with car controls" (13 June 2026) — a signal that the over-rotation toward glass is now visibly correcting. The pendulum is swinging back not because screens got worse, but because nobody did the felt judgment up front.

What DEPIX takes from the ES90

The ES90 is the clearest production example yet of an interior where the physical form is almost incidental and the decision is entirely subtractive. The competence on display is not "they built a great screen" — anyone can buy a great screen. It's whether the five things they kept physical were the right five. The reviews say Volvo kept too few, and crucially, that failure is only legible as an experience, never as a spec sheet.

That is precisely where design intelligence earns its keep. The hard call in a software-defined cabin — what do we refuse to digitize — is a question about felt experience made under cost pressure, before anything physical exists to test. It needs to be reasoned about, weighed, and judged at decision time, on the merits of the experience and the brand, not validated after tooling by a feature audit that will always say everything is fine. DEPIX exists for exactly that moment: helping the people who own the interior decide which gestures are worth keeping while the choice is still cheap to get right — because the screen was never the hard part. The restraint is. And restraint only shows up as a feeling.

Sources

• ●Volvo Cars, "The new, fully electric ES90 – defined by software and built on our Superset tech stack" — official press release, 5 March 2025 (media.volvocars.com / volvocars.com intl media).
• ●Motor1, "Volvo ES90: This Is It" — 5 March 2025 (14.5-inch portrait screen "handling nearly all the car's functionality"; "aside from a few buttons on the steering wheel and switches for the windows, this is an entirely digital affair").
• ●Motorauthority, "Volvo ES90 debuts March 5 with latest Superset tech stack"; electrive.com, "World premiere of the Volvo ES90" — 5 March 2025 (premiere date, Superset, dual NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin).
• ●Top Gear, "Volvo ES90 Interior Layout & Technology"; Volvo Cars UK ES90 interior design page (birch wood inlay, Nordico upholstery, two angled displays, 9.0-inch driver display) — accessed 15 June 2026.
• ●InsideEVs, "How The Volvo EX30's Minimalist Interface Feels To Operate" — 13 November 2023 ("the most sustainable component is the one that does not exist"; "one can build a habit in 1,000 repetitions").
• ●Irish Examiner, "Volvo ES90 review: luxury EV impresses but touchscreen controls frustrate drivers" — 2 May 2026 (glovebox/sunroof/mirrors/climate and steering-wheel adjustment all via touchscreen, "complete overkill and a massive pain," "It's not good," "a dramatic effect on its overall day-to-day user-friendliness").
• ●LinkedIn (Unipile posts search, account 3-_9FhafSuSvbZkSIKxgsw): Philip Lunn, "Insight into the trend to go more analogue with car controls" — 13 June 2026 (11 reactions); plus CHASSIS / Automotive-Chiplets post, "Driving Europe's Software-Defined Vehicle future" — 14 June 2026 (27 reactions, software-defined-vehicle ecosystem signal).