Walmart has invested in autonomous car company Cruise, ahead of a pilot delivery program with the GM-backed company's self-driving vehicles. The pilot was announced late last year and is expected to begin in 2021, as Walmart explores new options for the so-called "last mile" of getting groceries and more to shoppers.
Last year, Ford innocuously deployed ten test vehicles to partake in what the American carmaker refers to as the ‘Mother of All Road Trips’ to mark the final development leg of its newest BlueCruise hands-free driving tech. And now, Ford has announced that BlueCruise is available to download via over-the-air software updates later this year.
Domino's Pizza is working on replacing the traditional delivery person, with a new pilot of a robot courier going autonomous instead. While the pies and pepperoni may be the same, rather than a college kid in an old Prius it'll be a Nuro R2 that handles transportation to your door.
Volvo plans to bake NVIDIA's DRIVE chipsets for autonomous and smart cars into its next-generation platform, with the first fruit of that partnership to be revealed in 2022. The next-generation Volvo XC90 luxury SUV will use NVIDIA DRIVE Orin for its self-driving system, the chip-maker confirmed today at its GTC 2021 conference.
NVIDIA has given its "AI supercomputer on wheels" an upgrade, with the latest DRIVE Hyperion 8 getting as close to a turnkey self-driving car system as we've seen to date. It's based on two of the DRIVE Orin SoCs - with a combined 508 TOPS of performance - along with a surfeit of sensors and AV software.
NVIDIA has revealed its newest chipset for smart cars and autonomous vehicles, with DRIVE Atlan promising to be "an AI data center on wheels" with an exponential uptick in processing power. Targeting Level 4 and Level 5 self-driving vehicles - along with the next-generation of highly-assisted cars - NVIDIA DRIVE Atlan is expected to begin sampling to automakers and AV developers as soon as 2023.
Honda and Verizon are teaming up to test how the latter's 5G Ultra-Wideband and 5G Mobile Edge Compute (MEC) ensures a fast and reliable connection between vehicles, pedestrians, and road infrastructures. Honda's been developing its Safe Swarm collision-free technology since 2017. This new partnership with Verizon and the University of Michigan's Mcity will assess how Verizon's 5G networks and mobile edge computing (MEC) could benefit autonomous driving in general.
Three days ago, Toyota debuted its Advanced Drive autonomous driving tech in Japan, and the first vehicles to receive it are the 2022 Lexus LS and Toyota Mirai FCEV. Our report stated Advanced Drive is arriving in all U.S.-bound Lexus LS models – particularly the LS 500h hybrid – very soon, but we weren’t expecting it to come this soon.
In response to Cadillac’s Super Cruise and Tesla’s Autopilot, Toyota recently unveiled its newest Advanced Drive autonomous driving system, a human-centric driving assist feature born from the automaker’s Mobility Teammate Concept. Toyota’s latest Advanced Drive ADAS feature will first appear in the 2021 Lexus LS and Toyota Mirai FCEV.
Waymo's CEO is stepping down, Alphabet's autonomous car company has confirmed, with John Krafcik handing over the digital reins to the driverless vehicles to two new co-CEO instead. Dmitri Dolgov and Tekedra Mawakana - currently Waymo's COO and CTO - will both be responsible for Waymo moving forward, as the company considers how best to expand its robotaxi ride-hailing service.
Hyundai's handsome Ioniq 5 electric car will be ditching the driver, with Motional announcing the autonomous Lyft vehicles it's developing will be based on the recently-announced EV. The driverless EV crossovers are expected to go into deployment from 2023, with riders booking their trip through the regular Lyft app.
Autonomous car startup Voyage is being acquired by Cruise, with the GM-backed driverless vehicle company confirming deal rumors earlier this month. Voyage distinguished itself from most of the rest of the self-driving car ecosystem with both its deployment - in that it actually had an autonomous vehicle service running in the real world, rather than just plans for one - and its target audience.