Addressing the crowd surrounding the Mercedes Benz booth at CES 2019, Mercedes-Benz Executive Vice President Sajjad Khan and NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang have stated their plans to join hands to create a new AI architecture for the next generation of Mercedes cars. These cars shall take self-driving to the next level by providing a single system for the same and will, at the same time, be equipped with a smart-Cockpit whose functions shall replace a number of smaller car processes.
We’re announcing a new partnership going forward, creating a computer that defines the future of autonomous vehicles, the future of AI, and the future of mobility – Jensen Huang, NVIDIA Founder and CEO
As NVIDIA Partners Mercedes, it defines the goal of this project as creating software catering to the current requirements of cars as well as anticipating the software needs that may develop in the future in order to efficiently develop computing architecture that may seamlessly enable it, Huang added, “This car computer is going to do things that no computer that exists today literally does.”
The Mercedes-Nvidia partnership is a long-standing collaboration, which unveiled the Mercedes-Benz User Experience (MBUX) at CES 2018 – a project that incorporated AI with everyday driving and currently boasts of having seven car models under its wings, with nine more being added in 2019. Besides this, the partnership has also announced the inclusion of Bosch in a collaborative effort to operate an experimental robotaxi at San Jose in the latter part of this year.
The Mercedes-Nvidia partnership has given rise to a new type of car with NVIDIA DRIVE at its center. The innovative and unprecedented car architecture has added features like high-performance and energy-efficient computing to handle AI software to allow the seamless operation of advanced mobility technologies.
We need a partner we can rely on and work with, and I’m excited to say we’ve found that in NVIDIA. This partnership has brought us farther ahead than we ever could have. – Sajjad Khan, Executive Vice President, Mercedes-Benz
Mercedes-Benz’s centuries’ worth of experience in automobile engineering, combined with the high-performance, energy-efficient compute of NVIDIA DRIVE AGX platforms, is expected to create the next generation of vehicles where all systems shall be unified and centralized, instead of individual functions being divided among small Electronic Control Units spread throughout the length and breadth of the car. This shall give rise to an architecture that has its software constantly updated and integrated to provide the best self-driving or AI-powered user experiences, besides being a structure that is highly efficient and cost-effective.
Khan said that we are working on a different technology with NVIDIA to use AI in our products to lead the way in today’s megatrends.