Toyota, Aurora and Continental rely on Nvidia for autonomous driving

Toyota and Nvidia have agreed to cooperate on autonomous vehicle control. The Japanese car manufacturer plans to equip its next generation of vehicles with Nvidia Drive AGX Orin and the Californian AI computing specialist’s safety-certified Nvidia DriveOS operating system to provide advanced driver assistance systems. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced the cooperation at the CES trade fair in Las Vegas.

Toyota is already working with Nvidia on cloud computing and will expand the collaboration in the future. According to Techcrunch, the Toyota Research Institute has been using Nvidia’s technology to develop, train and validate its autonomous vehicle technology since 2019.

“Toyota is actually a great example of our cloud-to-car strategy,” Ali Kani, vice president of automotive at Nvidia, said Monday during a press briefing. “We had already partnered with Toyota in the cloud, and now we’re excited to extend that partnership and work with them in the car.”

However, Toyota is not the only car manufacturer relying on Nvidia for autonomous driving technology. In the press release, the company highlights its collaborations with Mercedes-Benz, Lucid, Rivian and Volvo, as well as with Chinese manufacturers BYD, Nio and Xiaomi, which relate to both driver assistance systems and future self-driving vehicles.

Industry safety audits by TÜV SÜD and TÜV Rheinland

As Nvidia also announced in Las Vegas, the platform for autonomous vehicles, Nvidia Drive AGX Hyperion, has passed the safety tests of TÜV SÜD and TÜV Rheinland.

Drive Hyperion, the industry’s first and currently only end-to-end autonomous driving platform, includes the Drive AGX system-on-a-chip (SoC) and reference board design, the Nvidia DriveOS automotive operating system, a sensor suite, and an active safety and Level 2+ stack.

Autonomously driving trucks

Aurora and Continental also signed a long-term partnership with Nvidia. Together, they want to develop autonomous trucks on a large scale – powered by Nvidia’s Drive Thor system-on-a-chip (SoC). Drive Thor is specifically designed to accelerate inference tasks essential for autonomous vehicles to understand their environment and navigate safely. The first production samples of Drive Thor are expected to launch in the first half of 2025.

The SoC and DriveOS software will be integrated into the Aurora Driver – an SAE level 4 autonomous driving system that Continental plans to bring into series production from 2027.

Continental and Nvidia had already announced the joint development of artificial intelligence (AI) for self-driving vehicles in 2018. The German automotive supplier concluded an exclusive partnership with Aurora for commercially scalable, autonomous truck systems in 2023. In their ‘partnership roadmap’ published in 2024, Continental and Aurora outlined a path to series production in 2027. Following the concept and design phase, Continental will build initial versions of the hardware for testing at its plant in New Braunfels, Texas, and at its global production sites. The partners are planning the completion, the start of production and integration for next year and the year after. This will be followed by “deployment at scale” in 2027 and beyond, when “thousands of trucks integrated with the Aurora Driver are ready to autonomously haul freight across the US.”

nvidianews.nvidia.com (cooperation), nvidianews.nvidia.com (TÜV), techcrunch.com