Starting in September 2020, carmakers saw the beginning of massive chip shortages that drastically cut revenues over the next year. Pickup trucks were stored unfinished in lots around the country for want of a vital chip.
Fast forward to January 2022, when research and investments in autonomous vehicle (AV) chips and components have gained ground, leading to a bullish market and promising new technologies.
Nvidia, Qualcomm and Intel’s Mobileye unit are among the chip designers poised to show off their AV progress at CES 2022 with mainly virtual announcements even as smaller companies showed up in person in Las Vegas.
“If you go back five years to where it was supposed to be in 2020, the work [on AVs] has definitely slipped a few years,” said Danny Shapiro, vice president of automotive for Nvidia, in an interview with Fierce Electronics prior to the kickoff of the event. “But the work being done is still amazing.
“The whole industry underestimated the difficulty“of producing autonomous technology for vehicles to be able to safe enough for use on streets, Shapiro said. “At Nvidia, we want to make sure we get it right. So, there’s a lot of testing and cost reduction and training AI in the data center and simulation. That’s because lives are at stake and we want to make sure it is done right.
“It is taking longer but still moving forward,” Shapiro said of AV tech. “We’ve continued to move forward and are continuing to invest. It’s an enormous pipeline.” Over six years Nvidia expects $8 billion in revenue from customers in the automotive trade, not including all the revenues in the data center business that work will generate. “We’re very bullish.”
In a special address at CES, Nvidia announced further work with TuSimple of San Diego on development of a SAE level 4 fully autonomous driving technology for long-haul heavy duty trucks. The companies are working on an autonomous domain controller (ADC) that will incorporate Nvidia Drive Orin system-on-chip for AI-based autonomous driving applications.
TuSimple plans to put autonomous trucks on an Autonomous Freight Network (AFN). Orin delivers 254 trillion operations per second, which will be essential for the ADC’s central compute function in a vehicle. “A high-performance, production ready ADC is a critical piece to scaling our AFN,” said Cheng Lu, CEO of TuSimple, in a statement. TuSimple will work with third party manufacturers to produce the ADC units.
TuSimple launched the first AFN in 2020 and operates a fleet of more than 50 autonomous trucks between Arizon and Florida.
In a blog, Shapiro described Nvidia’s Drive Hyperion platform with a sensor and computer architecture that relies on Orin SoC’s for use in software-defined vehicles that can be continuously upgraded. The latest Hyperion platform has 12 surround cameras, 12 ultrasonic sensors, nine radar sensors, three interior sensing cameras and one front-facing lidar. Shapiro said Hyperion has already been adopted by hundreds of vehicle makers.
Nvidia named Desay, Flex, Quanta, Valeo and ZF as Hyperion 8 platform partners. Also new energy vehicle startups and established players using Hyperon include Polestart, IM Motors, Li Auto, NIO, R Auto and Xpeng.
With increased demand for trucking and last-mile delivery with the pandemic’s impact on online purchasing, Shapiro noted the need for greater trucking autonomy amid a growing truck driver shortage.
Trucking autonomy will help in coming years as a hedge against future chip shortages for vehicles and supply chain woes, said Steve Koenig, vice president of research for the Consumer Technology Association. He cited TuSimple as a company offering technology for helping with the supply chain crunch. Autonomous technology “offers real solutions to real world problems,” he said in a special introductory address at CES.
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