All new Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles starting in 2025 will use Nvidia’s Drive technology to enable safety, automated and assisted driving and parking systems, the companies announced Wednesday.
The multi-year partnership will also bring AI capabilities inside the vehicle cab, including driver and occupant monitoring.
The technology includes Nvidia’s Drive Hyperion with Orin AV computers and Drive AV and IX software. Orin is the AI brain in the form of a System on Chip (SoC) which runs the Jaguar Land Rover Operating System, while Hyperion provides the central nervous system to connect a series of vehicle sensors, including lidar and radar, to Orin.
Nvidia sells Drive to other vehicle makers, but JLR will customize the car’s capabilities based on Drive to create a unique experience for customers, said Francois Dossa, executive director of strategy for JLR.
Drive will allow customers to update some features while also allowing assisted driving features at Level 2-plus up to level 3, which is often described as offering hands-off and eyes-off-the-road automation. Nvidia definied "highly automated" as a vehicle able to drive itself onto a freeway and maintain lanes and distance from other vehicles and change lanes when commanded to.
JLR will build an application layer for the look and feel of functionality in its vehicles and to let owners decides how the vehicle performs. “It’s a massive amount of software,” said Danny Shapiro, vice president of automotive at Nvidia, in comments with reporters. Nvidia has more software engineers than hardware engineers working on such capabilities alongside JLR engineers.
JLR’s Dossa said both companies have “extraordinary” numbers of software engineers and boasted that JLR has 1,800 software engineers working vehicle automation and other capabilities.
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