Nvidia Corp yesterday said that it would soon resume self-driving car road tests in the US, after they were suspended as a consequence of Uber Technologies Inc’s fatal crash in March.
The Graphics processing unit (GPU) supplier has been doing private virtual-reality road testing using headsets, chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) told a media briefing at the GPU Technology Conference in Taipei.
“We decided to take a step back and learn from everything that was happening to see if we needed to do anything different,” Huang said. “We came to the conclusion that we do not need to change anything. Our methodology is very rigorous.”
Photo: Ritchie B. Tongo, EPA
Nvidia must not cut any corners and needs to develop all necessary technologies, he said.
“If we do a good job, future cars will have fewer accidents. The ability to save lives is precisely the reason why we should push ahead — if not accelerate — the push for self-driving cars,” he said.
Industry initiatives are moving quickly, he added.
“Nothing is slowing anyone down,” Huang said. “We will start road testing here very soon. I have not told them [company engineers] exactly when.”
Nvidia is working on autonomous cars with about 370 global partners, including tier-one companies, original equipment manufacturers and start-ups, as well as trucking, car and shuttle firms, it said.
Regarding weakening demand from cryptocurrency mining, Huang said that “cryptocurrency is an extra bonus. It does not matter.”
Nvidia makes GPUs for gamers, but an increase in demand from cryptocurrency miners has increased prices and made them unaffordable for its original clientele, he said.
However, this is not what Nvidia hopes and is not its original intent in developing graphics chips, he added.
The company transitioned from in-car infotainment to self-driving cars seven years ago, Huang said.
“If something is easy to do, Nvidia does not do it. Nvidia is not an easy-computing company,” Huang said. “We always do things that are difficult. We decided to take all of our infotainment engineers and move them to autonomous driving.”
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