Toyota relies on Nvidia chip and operating system for autonomous vehicles

Toyota and Nvidia have agreed to cooperate on the control of autonomous vehicles at CES 2025. In the coming years, the world's largest car manufacturer will use new generations of cars with both chips and software from the leading manufacturer of AI accelerators. Toyota will use Nvidia's Drive AGX platform with the Orin combo processor and the DriveOS operating system. The German automotive supplier Continental will also intensify its cooperation with Nvidia in this area.

Nvidia presented the Orin next-gen processor for autonomous vehicles with high computing power back in 2019. According to the manufacturer, this combined processor (system-on-chip/SoC) coupled with GPUs should even be sufficient for autonomous driving at level 5, i.e. fully self-driving. This also includes Nvidia's own operating system for self-driving cars, DriveOS, which the manufacturer believes is designed with safety in mind.

Toyota is already working with Nvidia on cloud computing and will be expanding this in the future. According to Techcrunch, the Japanese manufacturer's research institute has been using Nvidia's cloud AI since 2019 to develop, train and validate autonomous driving technologies. In future, Nvidia technology will also be integrated into the vehicles themselves.

Nvidia technology not just for Toyota

"Toyota is actually a great example of our cloud-to-car strategy," explained Ali Kani, Vice President of Automotive at Nvidia, during a press conference on Monday. "We've already been working with Toyota in the cloud, and now we're excited to expand that partnership and work with them in the car."

However, Toyota is not the only manufacturer to rely on Nvidia for autonomous driving. The manufacturer itself refers to partnerships with Mercedes-Benz, Lucid, Rivian and Volvo, for example, as well as with the Chinese brands BYD, Nio and Xiaomi regarding driver assistance systems and future self-driving cars.

Autonomous trucks with Continental and Nvidia

At CES, Nvidia also announced an intensification of its collaboration with Continental. As early as 2018, Continental and Nvidia pooled their technology for autonomous driving with artificial intelligence. A platform for highly automated driving was to be developed by 2021. This has not yet materialized, but there is now a new multi-year strategic partnership between these two companies.

Nvidia and Continental, together with the US start-up Aurora Innovation, which develops technologies for self-driving vehicles, are now planning to put trucks that can drive autonomously on the roads on a large scale. To this end, Nvidia's DriveOS will be integrated into "Aurora Driver". Continental plans to be able to mass-produce this level 4 autonomous driving system from 2027.

(fds)