General
June 19, 2019
6 minutes read

Volvo Taps Nvidia To Develop Self-Driving Trucks

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang image: Nvidia Volvo and Nvidia have announced a collaboration that’ll see the Swedish automaker leverage the…

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

image: Nvidia

Volvo and Nvidia have announced a collaboration that’ll see the Swedish automaker leverage the “Nvidia Drive” autonomous driving stack to train, test and deploy its self-driving vehicles. Volvo will use Nvidia’s self-driving technology on a lineup of trucks, with a focus on public transport, refuse collection, mining, construction, freight transport, forestry and more.

Volvo and Nvidia will set up combined engineering teams in Gothenburg, Sweden — where Volvo is headquartered — and Silicon Valley — where Nvidia is based — to work on self-driving vehicles. The engineers will build on Nvidia’s Drive AGX Pegasus platform for AI computing and utilize the Drive AV software stack for computer vision.

Volvo CEO Håkan Samuelsson

image: Volvo

The use of trucks to deliver freight is rising. According to consultancy firm KPMG, delivery couriers will have to travel an additional 78 billion miles each year by 2040 to handle goods ordered online. Several companies are working on autonomous trucks to meet this demand. One example is TuSimple, which recently got a contract to deliver freight — via self-driving trucks — for the United States Postal Service. Experts at McKinsey predict that the use of autonomous trucks could bring down logistics costs in the U.S. by 45% – between $85 billion and $125 billion – annually.

Nvidia also recently partnered with another automaker, Toyota, to work on self-driving tech. The Santa Clara-based company has other self-driving partnerships with the likes of Volkswagen, Mercedes Benz, Audi, TuSimple, Zoox, Tesla, Uniti, Nuro, Pony.ai, Aurora, Airbus, Yandex, Velodyne and more.

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