Volvo has confirmed it’s dropping lidar for good on the EX90 and ES90, and it’s paying owners compensation for a feature they were promised but will never get.
In Norway, that payout is NOK 18,000 (about $1,900) per car, one of several market-by-market checks Volvo is writing after cutting ties with lidar supplier Luminar.
Owners get paid for a sensor that never worked
The EX90 and ES90 shipped with a roof-mounted Luminar Iris lidar unit baked into the hardware. The catch: the software features meant to use it never arrived, and now they never will.
Henrik Juel Teige, a spokesperson for Volvo Cars Norway, confirmed the decision this week. “Volvo Cars has ended its partnership with the company’s supplier of LiDAR technology and has discontinued its plans to develop LiDAR-based functions for the EX90 and ES90,” he said.
So Volvo is compensating the people who already bought the cars. The amount depends on where you live. Norway gets NOK 18,000 (~$1,900). Sweden saw a SEK 16,000 (~$1,600) price cut on affected pending orders back in November. In the US, owners are offered roughly $1,500 in optional packages, including SiriusXM and charging credits, a tire-and-wheel plan, or a maintenance package. Dutch buyers get €1,500 and Canadians get C$2,000.
It’s a quiet admission that customers paid for hardware that turned into dead weight on the roof.
Why Volvo walked away from Luminar
This has been building since last fall. We reported in November that Volvo was set to ditch lidar for 2026 and that Luminar was furious about it. Volvo terminated the contract entirely on November 14, citing supply chain risk and what it called Luminar’s failure to meet its contractual obligations.
Then the bottom fell out for the supplier. Luminar filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on December 15, 2025. Without a solvent supplier able to deliver and support the sensor, the lidar-based features Volvo had marketed were never coming.
Volvo insists the cars are still safe without it. “The company’s products can deliver a high level of safety and driver support, enabled by the cars’ powerful core computing coupled with their advanced sensor set, with or without a lidar,” the automaker said.
That sensor set is real. The EX90 still carries five radars, eight exterior cameras, two interior cameras, and 16 ultrasonic sensors. Losing the lidar removes one layer, not the whole safety stack.
Electrek’s Take
Predictably, a lot of people are reading this as a win for Elon Musk’s camera-only gospel. Musk himself jumped on it this week, responding to a fan’s post about the payout: “I did try to warn them. Humans drive using neural nets and optical sensors. Same is true for robot cars.”
But look at what Volvo actually kept. The EX90 and ES90 still run five radars each, plus a dozen cameras and 16 ultrasonic sensors. That’s not vision-only. That’s Tesla’s approach with a radar suite bolted on, which is closer to what Tesla itself keeps quietly flirting with going back to than to Musk’s pure-camera dream. Volvo didn’t validate the vision-only bet. It dropped one expensive sensor and leaned on the rest.
And Elon should be ashamed to respond to this:
Instead, he should take notes. What Volvo did, compensate owners for its failure to deliver features, is something he has been delaying to do for Tesla HW3 owners for years now.
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