The Japanese corporation Toyota, although experiencing some difficulties due to its conservatism, which prevents it from quickly adapting to the needs of the actively developing electric vehicle market, is trying to keep up with its competitors in the field of autopilot. An important step for its business was the announcement of cooperation with Nvidia in the development of appropriate systems based on processors of the Drive AGX Orin family.
Image source: NVIDIA
The partners have not yet specified which future models will use this hardware platform in combination with the safety-certified DriveOS operating system, but in this sense Toyota will at least keep up with many competitors who already use these solutions in their vehicles.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang presented the Thor processor with Blackwell architecture at CES 2025, which will underpin many solutions in the field of automation of both the transport control process and production functions in the field of robotics. The processor will be part of the Drive Hyperion platform, which will become a ready-made solution for the development of active driver assistance systems and full autopilot. Nvidia will offer automakers ready-made printed circuit boards with processors, the DriveOS operating system, a set of necessary sensors and related software. In addition, the company’s partners will be able to emulate a wide variety of traffic scenarios in the Omniverse virtual environment, significantly speeding up the training of specialized neural networks. The Drive Hyperion platform meets the requirements of TÜV SÜD and TÜV Rheinland – the most serious standards in the field of road safety.
So far, the platform allows for a level of autonomy higher than second, which implies the active participation of the driver in driving the car in most cases, but it is designed taking into account the possibility of subsequent modernization of not only software, but also hardware. Among the first companies ready to start using this platform are Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar Land Rover and Volvo Cars. The latter, as you know, belongs to the Chinese holding Geely, so its other brands will probably receive something in this regard. At least Zeekr is also mentioned in the list of Nvidia partners, as is the Chinese market leader BYD.
By the way, Continental, which is preparing to offer the startup Aurora solutions for automatic control of freight transport, will also develop its Level 4 autonomous control systems on the DriveOS software platform. True, in this case, partners will rely on Drive Orin processors belonging to the current generation. Still, Thor is a more promising development, which Nvidia customers will have access to in the current half of the year. Aurora is set to introduce its autonomous trucks in 2027. According to the head of Nvidia, for his company, the market capacity of automotive electronics this year in terms of revenue will reach $4 billion, and by 2026 it will grow to $5 billion.