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NVIDIA Enters Autonomous Driving Partnerships

NVIDIA has established partnerships with Toyota, Aurora, and Continental in pursuit of autonomous driving for consumer and commercial markets. Toyota, Aurora, and Continental are building autonomous driving technologies based on NVIDIA’s DRIVE system-on-chip (SoC) platform.

Toyota will build its next-generation vehicles on NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin, running the safety-certified NVIDIA DriveOS operating system. Other mobility companies adopting NVIDIA DRIVE AGX for their next-generation advanced driver-assistance systems and autonomous vehicle roadmaps include BYD, JLR, Li Auto, Lucid, Mercedes-Benz, NIO, Nuro, Rivian, Volvo Cars, Waabi, Wayve, Xiaomi, ZEEKR, and Zoox, among others.

Aurora, Continental, and NVIDIA also announced a long-term strategic partnership to deploy driverless trucks at scale, powered by NVIDIA DRIVE. NVIDIA’s accelerated compute running DriveOS will be integrated into the Aurora Driver, an SAE level 4 autonomous-driving system that Continental plans to mass-manufacture in 2027. Level 4 autonomy, as defined by automotive trade organization SAE, is the first of its five defined levels at which a human driver is not required. 

Aurora is reportedly in the final stages of validating the Aurora Driver for driverless operations on public roads. The system features a fleet of sensors including lidar, radar, and cameras, and a computer powered by a dual NVIDIA DRIVE Thor SoC configuration running DriveOS.

Continental is developing a hardware for the Aurora Driver, specifically for high-volume manufacturing. The company is also developing a specialized independent secondary system that can take over operation if a failure occurs in the primary Aurora Driver computer.

With start of production planned for 2027, Continental will test prototypes of the future hardware kit in the coming months. Continental will then integrate DRIVE Thor with DriveOS into the primary Aurora Driver computer at its manufacturing facilities and ship the full hardware kit to Aurora’s truck OEM partners for integration into customers’ trucks. As Continental and Aurora prepare to manufacture self-driving hardware at scale in 2027, production samples of DRIVE Thor are coming in the first half of 2025.

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