LOS ANGELES—Throughout the press and trade days at the LA Auto Show, most of the big car makers in attendance hold 30-minute press conferences on the show floor to unveil their latest car or announce new company strategies. Given the gearhead audience, it’s no surprise that most of these announcements focus more on horsepower and design than phone compatibility and computing power. But a few car companies are looking toward the future and switching things up.

​Volvo was one of the few automakers to highlight its infotainment center and consoles in its announcement of the new XC90 seven-seat SUV. (Audi and Honda were the only other automakers of the ten-or-so announcements we attended that spent time extolling the virtues of its new cars’ interior tech.) That may be because Volvo is in a unique position to experience its “rebirth,” as one Volvo spokesman termed it. While many automakers are trying to reinvent themselves after a depressing decade, Volvo has new money from Chinese automaker Geely behind it after its former parent company Ford sold Volvo in 2010.

That new money bought changes that are just starting to appear in Volvo’s 2015-and-beyond lineup. The company poured resources into building a small but powerful three turbo engine, which you can read about here, as well as equipping its cars with adaptive cruise control and collision avoidance mechanisms that turn on if the car is going below 30 miles per hour.

But Volvo also dedicated resources toward developing a 9.3-inch touchscreen center console and a host of in-house apps to go with it that put Volvo’s XC90 ahead of many of the abysmal infotainment systems you’ll see on 2015 models elsewhere. As Volvo User Experience Strategy Manager Sebastian Percival told Ars in San Francisco a month ago, the company is focusing on “small things make it easier to live with your car.”

Volvo is still safety first

In Los Angeles yesterday, Volvo Interaction Design Chief Mikael Gordh pointed out to Ars that the car maker put considerable thought into how the driver interacts with the control center during the act of driving.

For example, Volvo designed the car to have what Gordh called a “Now Area” in the driver’s immediate field of view around the steering wheel and the instrument cluster, and a “Whenever Area,” in the center console to the right. All critical information that the driver receives will go through the “Now Area,” and information secondary to driving the car is presented in the “Whenever Area.”

The Now Area consists of a digital instrument cluster which offers your standard speedometer and tachometer, but it also can show turn-by-turn directions on the screen between the two gauges. Design-wise, Volvo lets you choose a variety of skins for this instrument cluster, which is a unique feature in the auto landscape as it stands, but which suppliers like Nvidia and Delphi think will be standard in new cars in a couple of short years. The skin you choose for the XC90’s instrument cluster will also introduce subtle design tweaks on the center console to the driver’s right, but the key word there is subtle.

Like most other new cars these days, incoming phone calls will also pop up in this area for quick answering or ignoring.

On the steering wheel, physical buttons let the driver scroll through secondary information like music and climate if you need to change something but can’t take your eyes off the road.

A tablet in a car

Over in the Whenever Area, things get a bit more interesting. As we mentioned earlier, Volvo has replaced much of the center console with a portrait-oriented 9.3-inch touchscreen, augmented only by a number of understated physical buttons and dials beneath it.

If you’re thinking "gosh that looks a lot like Tesla’s implementation," you would not be alone, but Gordh insisted to Ars that the choice was organic and not influenced by Tesla. (We can only imagine that a conference room of grim-faced lawyers nodded silently in approval at the live feed from the show floor.)

Volvo said it did a lot of research on how best to implement a center console and settled on this layout for a number of reasons.

“Touchscreen is the only way to go” Gordh said, disparaging other cars whose center console screens are non-touch boxes. “You can use this with gloves, or it works if you have long nails."

Gordh went on to say that the low and wide screens that car makers are so fond of don’t support list views, and from navigation options to media, consumers primarily deal in lists while they’re driving.

The combination of the touchscreen and the physical buttons also means that the front seat passenger can use the physical buttons to turn down the music, for example, without disrupting the driver’s navigational view. (Tesla solves this by allowing a split screen view.)

Volvo’s proprietary software running the screen show is called Sensus, and even within the system there’s an ethos of the Now Area/Whenever Area concept as well. The screen is divided into tiles, each of which expand to show the information within, while leaving the other tiles still visible in a collapsed view. Navigation, Volvo says, will always be on top, as it is the most crucial information to the driving experience (maps are provided by Nokia HERE, which is generally regarded as a solid mapping system.) The Media tile is found beneath that, and additional information is beneath that. Climate control is found in a static row at the very bottom of the screen. The layout, Volvo says, reflects the amount of time people spend fiddling with or focusing on that particular type of information while driving.

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

In the XC90, Apple CarPlay will be supported the day the car is available, and Android Auto support will follow shortly thereafter. When a phone is connected to the car, Sensus brings up another tile which the driver can open and use to navigate as Apple and Google intended.

Finally, the car comes with an app you can use to check fuel levels, check if the doors are locked, and lock and unlock doors remotely. Drivers can also check fuel levels and if fuel is low, you can get a connected search for gas stations. And, the app comes with a driving journal, which can automatically record trip lengths—a helpful feature if you use your car to make work trips as well and want to expense the mileage or write off certain trips when you do your taxes.

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

Car makers are bad at providing computing specs

Despite these interesting advancements, there are still several things we don’t know. Who is building the software? What kind of processing power is behind the touchscreen, the instrument cluster, and other running systems like adaptive cruise control and collision avoidance? What kind of connectivity will be provided to support Sensus’ functions? Volvo was evasive about providing firm answers on these issues.

For software, Gordh could only say that Volvo purchased the operating system from a Tier-1 supplier, and that Volvo then built many of the applications on top of it in-house. At least Volvo seems to be aware that updates will have to happen with relative frequency, at least, compared to the slow-moving auto industry. Gordh said that some updates might happen over the air, but other more critical updates will require customers to take their cars into the dealership.

Speaking of over-the-air updates, When Ars spoke to Volvo in San Francisco in October, the team said that the V60, a 2015 wagon in Volvo’s lineup, will come with six months free of AT&T-provided 3G connectivity, after which customers can choose to purchase a data plan on their own dime. In Los Angeles in November, however, Gordh said that the details of the XC90’s connectivity plans would not be announced until closer to, if not on, the day when the car actually goes on sale. One hopes that 4G connectivity is a part of the luxury car’s new deal.

Still, Percival said that the car won’t chug a whole lot of data when in use. “What we have done with the connected services is design them to not pull too much data,” he said, adding that if you wanted to, you could use the car as a Wi-Fi hotspot.

Although these issues still need to shake out before the car can really be considered a leader in car tech, the user interface does show concern for its context: driving. As Gordh put it, every car in the future will have navigation, media, and some form of connectivity. But making it all work seamlessly is the challenge.

"It’s hard to differentiate on features," he said. "But user experience is where you can differentiate.”