Jaguar Land Rover Picks Nvidia To Power Future Assisted And Automated Driving

Over the past decade, engineers at Jaguar Land Rover have dabbled in automated driving systems (ADS) and done a number of interesting demonstrations including automated off-roading with a Range Rover. But as one of the smaller global automakers, JLR just doesn’t have the financial and engineering resources to throw at fully developing ADS in house. That’s why they have followed in the footsteps of Mercedes-Benz and selected Nvidia and its Hyperion Drive platform to power all new models starting in 2025.

Hyperion Drive is Nvidia’s reference full-stack ADS platform. It starts with a centralized compute platform based around the Orin system-on-a-chip (SoC) with 254 trillion operations per second performance per chip for artificial intelligence calculations. On top of that, the Drive AV software enables all of the advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) and ADS functions including the perception, prediction and path planning functions. 

Any company using Nvidia’s compute hardware can use either all of Drive AV or select specific functions to integrate within their own software. Like Mercedes-Benz, JLR is using the full software stack running on its own in-house operating system. Along with the AV software, Nvidia also provides Drive IX which is focused on the in-vehicle user experience. This includes the ability to create the visualizations that Tesla drivers are used to with AutoPilot and full self-driving beta software which display everything detected by the sensors. 

Unlike Tesla however, Nvidia is not trying to insist that automated driving can be done with cameras alone. The current Hyperion 8 development kit includes 12 cameras, 9 radars, 12 ultrasonic sensors and a forward facing lidar from a variety of vendors and the software is designed to use all of them. JLR plans to leverage radar, cameras and ultrasonic sensors initially for hands-free driving capabilities similar to GM’s Super Cruise.

Lidar and an expanded suite of cameras and radar will be added to enable so-called L3 capability. The recently launched Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot system in Europe is among the first to provide this capability where the driver can go hands and feet-off and not watch the road continuously. Current laws in Europe limit this functionality to 37 miles per hour so it is effectively a traffic jam assist.

Volvo is planning a similar system called Ride Pilot which it wants to launch in California because the law would allow it to be used at full highway speeds. While these systems don’t require driver supervision, the driver must remain at the wheel and be ready to take over when the vehicle reaches the limit of its operational design domain, so they can’t crawl in the back seat and take a nap. By the time JLR’s system arrives, it will likely try to emulate the Volvo functionality in markets where the law allows and probably be restricted to lower speeds in other regions.

Another aspect we don’t know is how many Orin SoCs JLR will use. The Hyperion development kit runs on a single chip, but most production programs using Orin including Volvo and Mercedes-Benz are using two SoCs and Chinese automaker Nio is using four Orin’s for its upcoming ET7 sedan. 

In addition to ADAS/ADS systems, JLR and Nvidia engineers will collaborate on new data centers for JLR to power AI training and the Drive Sim platform for testing and validation. The companies will also be collaborating to develop connected vehicle services although no details have been revealed yet. One possibility is that JLR may utilize the DeepMap platform that Nvidia acquired in 2021. DeepMap is a crowdsourced platform for building high-definition maps used by ADS and future JLR vehicles could be feeding data into the platform.