The CEOs of Mercedes-Benz and Nvidia announced today at a press event that they were launching a partnership for a, quoting Ola Källenius, “groundbreaking, software-defined, high-performance computer architecture for driving assistance and autonomous drive.”
NVIDIA is helping the transportation industry by giving it access to its deep neural networks (DNNs) for autonomous vehicles.
Tesla is a tech company, not just a car company. Although, some still seem to believe otherwise. Joel Feder sparked a debate on Twitter by voicing his thoughts about Tesla. In his tweet, he says, “Reminder: Tesla is a car company. Tesla is not a tech company. It builds cars.”
In June 2019 after Tesla’s Autonomy Investor Day, we did a deep dive into Tesla’s HW3 chip that explored the various capabilities and potential of the HW3 processor system on a chip (SoC). I may have geeked out a little and made that a bit too technical, so I will try not to repeat that mistake in this article. Long story short, HW3 is a total beast. It is very different from the NVIDIA chip Tesla was using in the previous generation.
I recently met with Dr. Xinzhou Wu, Vice President of Autonomous Driving at Xpeng Motors, to learn more about the company’s autonomous vehicle (AV) bottom-up approach, part of its long-term strategic plan. Dr. Wu is in charge of overall strategy and technical planning of the business and team management for Xpeng’s global autonomous driving R&D center in Silicon Valley, California.
As self-driving cars move closer and closer to reality, one particular market stands to benefit — autonomous taxis (aka robotaxis). Tasha Keeny from Ark Invest recently evaluated the players who’d likely benefit from this massive market opportunity. Keeney writes, “Autonomous vehicles will transform personal mobility … reap[ing] the benefits of a new market which promises to ramp from essentially $0 now to $10 trillion in global gross annual revenues by 2030.”
The first confirmed upgrade to Tesla’s new Full Self Driving hardware version 3 took place today after a customer took his 2018 Tesla Model S P100DL into the Santa Barbara service center to get a new HEPA filter. After the service, Twitterer and longtime Tesla supporter Sofiaan Fraval noticed that a line on his service documents indicated that the new hardware had been installed at the appointment as well (h/t to Vincent for spotting this one).
For any skeptics doubting the revolutionary capabilities of Tesla’s new Full Self Driving (FSD) compute hardware, why not tune in to what autonomy hardware rival Nvidia have to say about it? Nvidia has said that Tesla’s new hardware has just “raised the bar for self-driving computers.”
After Tesla lowered the pricing of all of its new vehicles last week, Tesla offered up discounts on its newly reframed Autopilot and Full Self Driving options for existing owners as a way of compensating them for the loss in value they experienced virtually overnight.
Following up on EV battery and EV charging #NewsBonanza posts, here’s one on 11 autonomous vehicle & AI stories from the past couple of months that we thought should be covered but we never got to for individual stories. Enjoy.
