Daimler-Bosch Self-Driving ‘Collaboration’ Starts ‘Pilot Testing’ in 2019, Says Nvidia

"Pilot testing" will begin next year in Silicon Valley on the Daimler-Bosch “collaboration” using Nvidia’s Drive Pegasus artificial-intelligence “brain” for Level 4- and Level 5-scale autonomous vehicle “fleets,” said Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress on a Thursday-evening earnings call after quarterly results. Nvidia recently started shipping “development systems” for Drive Pegasus, an “AI supercomputer designed specifically for autonomous vehicles,” said Kress. Drive Pegasus is capable of 320 trillion operations a second, so it can handle “diverse and redundant algorithms” in self-driving cars, she said. Hardware and software “co-designed” around the Drive Pegasus AI brain creates a “platform” that meets the international ISO 26262 standard, “the industry’s highest level of automotive functional safety,” she said. “We have created a scalable AI car platform that spans the entire range of automated and autonomous driving, from traffic-jam pilots to Level-5 robotaxis.” More than 370 companies and research institutions are using the platform, she said: “With this growing momentum and accelerating revenue growth, we remain excited about the intermediate and long-term opportunities for the autonomous driving business.”