From the San Francisco Business Times, February 28:
A Mercedes-Benz autonomous test vehicle spotted Friday in San Francisco's Marina district appears to be a partnership between the German car maker and Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA).
The vehicle, an all-electric EQS 580 with sensors similar to those found on Waymo cars, had a sticker on the driver's side door saying "Nvidia Corporation | Mercedes-Benz test vehicle."
Neither company responded to a request for comment asking for more details about the project.
While Nvidia and Mercedes-Benz have previously announced a partnership to use Nvidia's chips and AI software in its vehicles, they have not made any formal announcement related to testing fully autonomous vehicles on U.S. roads.
Nvidia currently has a permit with California's DMV to test autonomous vehicles with a safety driver, while Mercedes-Benz holds a more advanced permit with the DMV, allowing it to deploy AVs without a human driver in certain areas...
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Related at Yahoo Finance, also February 28:
Nvidia's auto business doubled last quarter. Here's why CEO Jensen Huang believes it's just the beginning.
Nvidia’s foray into the automotive sector is nothing new, but the drumbeat of news coming from the business has picked up recently.
Take CES last month, for example, where the company highlighted the business.
"In order to build a self-driving car, you need to train a mountain of data, video data," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in an interview with Yahoo Finance from CES, explaining that Nvidia's graphics chips can be used not just for video games, but for simulations to train autonomous vehicles.
"If just right now where the self-driving car business is, if it's already a $5 billion business for us, imagine how big it's going to be when we have a hundred million new cars per year. A trillion miles driven per year. This is likely going to be one of the largest robotics industries in the world and one of the largest computing industries in the world," Huang said.
The company made a slew of news this quarter and at CES on the automotive front.
Nvidia announced that Toyota (TM) — the world’s largest automaker — will begin using the company’s DRIVE AGX Orin chip and the Nvidia DriveOS operating system to power advanced driver assistance features in its next-generation vehicles.
Nvidia said German tire and auto supplier Continental and self-driving truck company Aurora (AUR) would also use Nvidia’s DRIVE hardware and DriveOS software in Aurora’s level 4 autonomous driving system, Aurora Driver. Continental and Aurora plan to bring autonomous trucks hauling freight to roads beginning in 2027.
And Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group announced it would use Nvidia technologies to accelerate AV and robotics development, as well as smart factory initiatives....
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Before we get to the headline story, some background. Tesla and Nvidia have a history.
In 2015 - 2016 when everyone thought that autonomous driving was just around the corner, the challenge was seen as both a sensor issue, for example: LIDAR vs cameras, and a machine learning/artificial intelligence problem which boils down to training the AI 'puters with as much data as you can so that out in the real world the autonomous vehicle can say to itself: "Yeah, I've seen this situation before, here's the response that worked best. Both the training and the on-the-road-recall, if they are to be anywhere near efficient, require the fastest chips you can find. Tesla had a whole bunch of data from a few billion miles of actual driving for computers to train on, and, combined with Nvidia's fastest-in-the-world GPU chips, it was a match made in heaven.
Except it wasn't.
The challenge of autonomous driving on open roads alongside non-autonomous vehicles was bigger than anyone in that simple, optimistic time ever envisioned, even in their nightmares. Here's one example about Waymo from a 2017 post:
"When Google was training its self-driving car on the streets of Mountain View, California, the car rounded a corner and encountered a woman in a wheelchair, waving a broom, chasing a duck. The car hadn’t encountered this before so it stopped and waited."
In May 2015 we were posting " Nvidia Wants to Be the Brains Of Your Autonomous Car (NVDA)" and seven months later the more declarative "Class Act: Nvidia Will Be The Brains Of Your Autonomous Car (NVDA)"
Then in October 2016, what was probably the high-water mark for the relationship "Nvidia Could Make $1B From Tesla's Self-Driving Decree: Analyst (TSLA, NVDA)"
Sadly, the task was just too difficult but Mr. Musk thought it was doable if only he could get even faster chips than Nvidia had on offer:
NVIDIA Partner Tesla Reportedly Developing Chip With AMD (TSLA; NVDA; AMD)
Today in leveraged WTFs....
The only reason for Tesla to do this is that NVIDIA's chips are general purpose whereas specialized chips are making inroads in stuff like crypto mining (ASICs), Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) for machine learning and Facebook's hardware efforts.
We've said NVIDIA probably has a couple year head start but this bears watching, so to speak....
Culminating in August 2018's
"Nvidia CEO is 'more than happy to help' if Tesla's A.I. chip doesn't pan out" (NVDA; TSLA)
And now on to the headliner, from Observer, June 8....
