GPU giant Nvidia is partnering with Jaguar Land Rover to create new smart operating systems for cars, with a software-focused approach apparently being applied to all vehicles released after 2025.
For a long time, cars have been more about the physical vehicle itself than the underlying software, however this refocused approach from Jaguar Land Rover, in partnership with Nvidia, puts the software centre-stage.
“The age of fixed-function devices is over,” says Danny Shapiro, the vice president of the automotive wing at Nvidia.
“What we’ve found is that the traditional electrical architectures of vehicles were never designed to support such a software-first approach. The vast majority of vehicles still rely of dozens of ECUs throughout the car with each ECU specialised for a certain task. Rather than hardcoding dedicated functions into ECUs, a modern vehicle requires high-performance computing; a central computer, essentially, and complex software stacks that leverage artificial intelligence.”
He continued by saying that with this unified architecture, “OEMs can integrate and update advanced software features throughout the life of the car” and that these software-defined vehicles will become “perpetually updateable machines – they’ll get better and better”.
Nvidia is focusing on bringing high-performance computing into the vehicle space with this Jaguar Land Rover partnership. This move is a part of the carmaker’s “Reimagine” strategy, which seeks to look at elements of vehicles from new angles. New vehicles will be powered by Jaguar Land Rover OS while leveraging Nvidia software stacks to enhance the driving experience. It’s not the first time Jaguar Land Rover has delved into high-tech software, as it rolled out Amazon Alexa across old and new vehicles just a few weeks ago.
This news also means that Jaguar Land Rover is the latest car company to hop on board with Nvidia’s car tech, with Volvo, Zoox and SAIC already using it.
Today, Jaguar Land Rover has announced that new vehicles (developed for release in 2025 and after) will be created on the Nvidia Drive Hyperion 8 platform, which is capable of automated driving, automated parking, driver assistance and enhanced safety measures. This is all powered by Nvidia’s advanced AI architecture and Drive Orin, a central computer for smart vehicles.
Drive Orin is expected to deliver something special in upcoming Jaguar Land Rover vehicles — this central computer is capable of 254 TOPS (trillion operations per second), meaning it should be a pretty fast thinker.
On top of this smart approach to Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles, new vehicles will receive software updates as time goes on. The focus of all of this, however, is on providing a more “elegant and smarter driving experience”. Specific support timeframes haven’t been indicated. It’ll be interesting to see if Jaguar Land Rover nominate windows of obsolescence for their car technology, much like Apple and its iPhones.
“At Jaguar Land Rover, we’re reimagining modern luxury and how our customers experience their vehicle,” says François Dossa, the executive director of strategy and sustainability at Jaguar Land Rover.
“Together with Nvidia, we can now accelerate our in-vehicle software, uniquely delivering modern luxury experiences.
“From 2025, all new Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles will be built on the Nvidia Drive Hyperion computing and sensing platform.”
Work has already begun on Nvidia-powered Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles. Data centres are a focus for the moment, with engineers from both sides of the partnership working on experiments with the upcoming technology through raw data collection.
Also, yes, for those who are wondering, Jaguar Land Rover is a single company. The two companies were purchased by Tata Motors, an Indian automotive brand, in 2008 and were merged in 2013.
Nvidia’s driving sim will be used in developing this tech, as will Nvidia supercomputers.