Toyota Self-Driving Car Release Date, Specs News: Automaker Partners With NVIDIA, Will Use Drive PX AI Platform
After unveiling the Concept-i at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, Toyota has been fairly quiet on its self-driving car endeavor. But now, new details have emerged, and it points to a partnership between the Japanese automaker and chipmaker NVIDIA as the former will make use of the latter's artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
On Wednesday, at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced that Toyota will use their technology to develop self-driving vehicles set to arrive in the next few years.
Specifically, the automaker will use NVIDIA's Drive PX AI platform. It is powered by the new Xavier system-on-chip (SoC) processor which comes with a 512-core Volta graphics processing unit (GPU). Huang revealed that despite generating 30 teraflops of AI deep-learning computing power, their platform only consumes 30 watts of power.
"This is a company that is legend in so many ways... so many modern management system were invented by this company," Huang said about Toyota. "Our two engineering teams are working to create their autonomous car and put in on the road in the next few years," the CEO added.
Toyota's timeline coincides with many other automakers and tech companies who have previously announced their intention to release self-driving cars by 2020 or 2021. Meanwhile, NVIDIA has partnered with several other automakers such as Audi and Mercedes for their respective self-driving car projects.
According to The Verge, Toyota has two goals for its autonomous cars. One would be designed to help the elderly and disabled while the other would serve as fully autonomous production cars with technology that would operate in the background and take control of the car to prevent accidents.
Apart from the technologies previewed by their self-driving concept, Toyota has not really revealed a lot when it comes to their plans for autonomous vehicles. However, more information will be revealed once the automaker ramps up development and testing as their target release date draws closer.
