The phenomenon of self-driving cars has been attracting carmakers for a while now despite severe safety challenges
General Motors (GM) has decided to collaborate with the chip giant Nvidia to create next-generation self-driving cars, factories and robots. Remember, GM stopped its Cruise robotaxi operations last year. Going forward, the American auto giant wishes to utilize Nvidia’s AI chips and accelerated computing to come up with vehicles with high levels of ADAS. In the last few years, Nvidia has emerged as an AI expert, becoming one of the world’s most valuable companies. It has a valuation of around $3 trillion.
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GM and Nvidia to Develop Self-Driving Cars
GM will not only incorporate Nvidia’s chips into its new breed of EVs but also leverage the latter’s expertise to optimize manufacturing and build robots. This is a clear indication of how it wants to use the latest tech to optimize every aspect of its operations. That is in line with what most industries are doing to cut costs and improve efficiency by bringing in the power of AI and unprecedented computing power.
We know that ADAS demands powerful chips to process data from multiple cameras, radars, sensors, etc., to ensure that the vehicle is able to recognize everything around it in real-time. Furthermore, this data needs to be analyzed and the decision has to be made in a matter of nanoseconds. We have seen the undesirable consequences when test cars were involved in accidents in recent times.
That is also the reason why GM shut its Cruise robotaxi division last year. Still, during its Q4 and full-year 2024 earnings call in January, the U.S. car marque mentioned that an increasing number of customers are signing up for the Super Cruise ADAS. GM already has over 360,000 vehicles on the road with this feature. We already know how aggressively Tesla is pursuing this technology.
As per Dave Richardson, Senior VP, Software & Services Engineering at GM, “GM already has been investing in NVIDIA GPU platforms for AI model training. Now we’re extending this relationship to improve automotive plant design and operations. Using the NVIDIA Omniverse™ platform, we’re creating digital twins of assembly lines, enabling virtual testing and production simulations to reduce downtime. We will also use NVIDIA DRIVE AGX for in-vehicle hardware for future advanced driver-assistance systems and in-cabin enhanced safety driving experiences.“
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Learn Electric Cars Says
The autonomous driving industry has been specifically gaining popularity in the last few years. As a consequence, car companies are investing huge sums of money to develop this tech above Level 2. However, due to safety reasons, it is quite challenging to gain people’s trust just yet. Also, some accidents during testing have further prevented new customers from getting excited about it. It remains to be seen how things pan out in this space in the coming years.