Volvo makes a bigger bet on Nvidia for hands-free automated driving

Volvo is leveling up its automated driving system through an expansion of its nearly decade-long partnership with Nvidia. The companies announced on Thursday that Volvo will use three pieces of Nvidia hardware and software in its future vehicles to provide an automated driving system that can navigate urban streets and highways.

Under the expanded partnership, Volvo will combine its vehicle safety systems and engineering with Nvidia’s Hyperion sensor and compute architecture, Alpamayo driving software stack, and Halos safety evaluation layer.

The Alpamayo stack is redundant and diverse, according to Ali Kani, who heads up Nvidia’s automotive division. It combines Alpamayo, a family of AI models, datasets, and simulation and development tools used to build autonomous-driving software, with classical software that uses machine learning and camera and radar perception, he said.

“The point is we run these two stacks at the same time, and we have multimodal sensors in our philosophy because because it’s a safer product that way,” Kani said, adding that the open-source Alpamayo software has now been downloaded by more than 650,000 developers.

Volvo didn’t reveal the value of the partnership or which vehicle model would be the first to use this new Nvidia tech stack. But Alwin Bakkenes, Volvo’s head of software development, hinted at the scale of the deal and how it represents the automaker’s evolution toward developing a full-tech stack designed for its electric vehicles as well as its plug-in hybrids and gas-powered vehicles.

“Automakers used to be very much like car-line based development and working with various suppliers, etc. and we have completely changed and migrated into being a full tech stack company,” Bakkenes said, adding that Volvo will start this partnership with a brand new vehicle that “will come in the not-too-near future.”

He said the first vehicle with this new Nvidia tech stack will debut within the decade, and “then of course the technology can go beyond that.”

While Volvo’s relationship with Nvidia isn’t new, the expanded partnership represents the automaker’s effort to bring the latest automated driving software to all of its vehicles — not just its EVs.

All of Volvo’s battery-electric vehicles use Nvidia’s Orin computer chip, which processes information from cameras, radar, and other sensors to help a vehicle understand its surroundings and make driving decisions.

“What we’re going to do in the future is actually standardize more on Hyperion — also from a sensor set perspective — to really open up the stack for for the wider partnership with Nvidia,” Bakkenes said.

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Kirsten Korosec is a reporter and editor who has covered the future of transportation from EVs and autonomous vehicles to urban air mobility and in-car tech for more than a decade. She is currently the transportation editor at TechCrunch and co-host of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. She is also co-founder and co-host of the podcast, “The Autonocast.” She previously wrote for Fortune, The Verge, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and CBS Interactive.

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