Volvo Cars is expanding its partnership with NVIDIA so that future Volvo cars can drive themselves door to door. That covers highways, busy city streets and parking. The system runs on NVIDIA's Hyperion sensor and compute architecture. It will debut in a next-generation Volvo car, part of what the carmaker calls its largest-ever product push.
According to NVIDIA, three of its products go into the stack: Hyperion, the Halos OS safety software and the Alpamayo Stack driving software. Volvo Cars supplies its own vehicle safety systems and engineering. Both companies describe a gradual introduction of eyes-off and mind-off driving. They have worked together since 2017. Volvo Cars has not named the car, the date or the automation level it is targeting.
NVIDIA describes Hyperion as a production-ready sensor and compute platform with a standardized sensor suite and two DRIVE AGX Thor chips, built to scale from L2++ driver assistance to Level 4. NVIDIA also says the redundant compute, sensors and safety mechanisms meet ISO 26262 ASIL-D requirements, and it rates a single DRIVE AGX Thor at up to 1,000 INT8 TOPS.
Volvo Cars describes a staged move toward eyes-off and mind-off driving in its own cars, while NVIDIA sells the same architecture to builders of robotaxis, shuttles and delivery fleets. Volvo Cars calls the computing it is bringing into its next generation of electric cars the industry's most advanced.
On safety, NVIDIA describes Halos as a full-stack system built on TÃœV SÃœD-certified development processes. Halos OS supplies the system software safeguards. The Alpamayo driving model is paired with independent safety checks. A separate Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab reviews how partners integrate those elements and issues inspection reports and certificates. NVIDIA says it is the first program anywhere accredited by ANAB for AI functional safety.
