Volvo abandons LiDAR on EX90 and ES90 and starts compensating owners

Volvo has given up on LiDAR for good. After removing the laser scanning sensor from the roof of the EX90 and ES90 electric cars, the Swedish automaker confirmed that it has also abandoned the development of driver assistance functions that depended on the equipment — and has begun to compensate those who bought the cars relying on these technologies.

In Norway, each owner of an EX90 or ES90 equipped with the sensor will receive 18,000 Norwegian kroner (about $1,900), according to Volvo Cars spokesman Henrik Juel Teige in a statement to the Motor.no website. The amount is equivalent to the discount already granted on cars of the 2026 model year that left the factory without the package. In the United States, the brand offers about US$ 1,500 in options, such as maintenance plans and recharge credits; in Sweden, it cut 16,000 Swedish kronor from pending applications in November. Owners in the Netherlands and Canada report receiving 1,500 euros and $2,000, respectively, according to a survey by the website Electrek.

The change of course began to take shape in November 2025, when Volvo started producing the two models without the sensor and, days later, formally broke the contract with Luminar, the North American company that supplied the equipment. “Volvo Cars made this decision to limit the company’s exposure to supply chain risks, and it is a direct result of Luminar’s failure to meet its contractual obligations,” Volvo Cars’ U.S. division said in a statement.

What LiDAR?

LiDAR — an acronym for light distance detection and measurement — uses laser pulses to assemble a three-dimensional map of the car’s surroundings and power the security systems, with a range of about 250 meters in the dark. Exclusive supplier of the component since 2020, when Volvo also invested in the company, Luminar saw the sensor no longer be a standard item, become optional for the 2026 model year and, finally, be eliminated from the list. The Polestar 3, which shares the SPA2 platform with the EX90, also lost the equipment.

Despite the removal of the hardware, Volvo says that the two models continue to meet the brand’s internal safety standards and maintain a high level of driver assistance, supported by the central computing architecture and the rest of the sensor suite. The EX90 remains with five radars, eight external cameras, two internal cameras and 16 ultrasonic sensors.

On the other hand, Luminar did not survive the rupture. The company had previously filed a claim for significant loss damages against Volvo and suspended further deliveries of the Iris sensor before filing for court protection in the United States on December 15, 2025, in bankruptcy court for the Southern District of Texas. Under Chapter 11, it submitted a liquidation plan and negotiated the sale of the chip division to Quantum Computing for $110 million.

The episode has become fuel in the dispute over which technology should guide autonomous driving. Elon Musk, from Tesla — who defends systems based only on cameras — responded to a publication about the compensation by saying that he had tried to warn the automakers, since humans drive with neural networks and optical sensors. The argument has limits: without LiDAR, the EX90 continues to use radars and ultrasonic sensors, that is, it has not migrated to an exclusively visual architecture.

In Brazil, the EX90 has been sold since 2025 at around R$ 850 thousand, imported from the United States, and the LiDAR appeared among the selling points of what the brand called the safest car it has ever produced. Until the publication of this report, Volvo had not announced whether it will extend any compensation to Brazilian buyers.