NVIDIA's Drive Hyperion hardware for self-driving cars has been chosen by Lucid Group and BYD for their present and upcoming electric vehicles.
In separate press releases, the two EV makers said the autonomous vehicle AI platform will help them boost the capability of their battery-electric cars.
In fact, this is the first time Lucid Group has revealed that its DreamDrive software stack runs on the NVIDIA Drive platform. By integrating the latest NVIDIA Drive Hyperion centralized compute architecture into the DreamDrive Pro ADAS suite, Lucid says its vehicles will gain new features in the future via over-the-air updates.
"The seamless integration of NVIDIA's software-defined compute architecture and Drive OS provides a powerful basis for Lucid to further enhance what DreamDrive can do in the future – all of which can be delivered to vehicles over the air. This can benefit every facet of the DreamDrive Pro experience."
Michael Bell, Senior Vice President of Digital, Lucid
NVIDIA's Drive Hyperion platform is powered by the Drive Orin system-on-a-chip (SoC) which acts as the central computer for intelligent vehicles. Lucid did not provide details about the new features that will be enabled by NVIDIA Drive Hyperion on the Air and other future models.
As for BYD, the Chinese automaker says it will use the NVIDIA Drive Hyperion computing architecture in its new energy vehicles (NEVs) for automated driving and parking, starting in the first half of 2023. BYD's NEVs will also feature the NVIDIA Drive Orin system-on-a-chip (SoC) as the centralized compute and AI engine for automated driving and intelligent cockpit features.
Billed as the world's highest performance automotive-grade SoC, NVIDIA Drive Orin is the AI brain of next-generation vehicles. Capable of delivering 254 trillions of operations per second of compute performance, Drive Orin features high-speed peripheral interfaces and high memory bandwidth (205 GB/sec) that allows it to seamlessly handle data from multiple sensor configurations for safe and secure intelligent driving capabilities.
"Software-defined autonomy and electrification are some of the driving forces behind the automotive industry's transformation. Through the power of AI and the NVIDIA Drive platform, BYD will deliver software-defined EV fleets that are not only safe and reliable but also improve over time."
Rishi Dhall, Vice President of Automotive, NVIDIA
Several other automakers also picked NVIDIA as an autonomous driving partner, including Jaguar and Mercedes-Benz. In fact, the California-based technology company says that Orin has become the choice AI compute platform for 20 of the top 30 passenger EV makers in the world.
