Nvidia Partners With Continental On AI Self-Driving Cars

NVIDIA Corporation NVDA announced a partnership with Continental Monday to develop an artificial intelligence system for Level 2 through Level 5 autonomy.

The firms’ engineering teams will collaborate to leverage Continental’s expertise in achieving ASIL D-rated safety and integrate its sensor technologies with NVIDIA’s Drive platform, Xavier chip system and Drive OS and AV software.

"The vehicle of the future will be a sensing, planning and acting computer on wheels,” Continental CEO Elmar Degenhart said in a statement. “The complexity of autonomous driving requires nothing less than the full computational horsepower of an AI supercomputer. Together with NVIDIA, we will deliver the complete AI self-driving solution from the cloud to the car.”

The initial technology will include HD maps and support 360-degree perception, automatic lane changing and traffic merging. A Level 3-enabling product will hit the market in 2021, according to Continental. 

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said: "We now have all the key elements in place to take AI self-driving cars from development to mass production." 

The partnership opens NVIDIA to a vast market opportunity. Continental’s advanced driver assistance systems, which unite camera, radar and LiDAR technology, garnered more than 1.2 billion pounds in 2016, and the company expects to double sales to 2.5 billion pounds by 2020.

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Continental CEO Elmar Degenhart, left, and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang are partnering to create artificial intelligence for self-driving vehicles. Photo courtesy of Continental.