NVIDIA has announced a significant advancement in the automotive industry with the adoption of its DRIVE Thor™ centralized car computer by leading companies across various sectors. This development impacts consumer and commercial transportation, including new energy vehicles, trucks, robotaxis, robobuses, and last-mile autonomous delivery vehicles.
DRIVE Thor, which succeeds the DRIVE Orin platform, is engineered for generative AI applications, increasingly crucial in the automotive domain. It aims to provide a unified platform for both advanced cockpit functionalities and highly automated or autonomous driving, ensuring safety and security. This latest autonomous vehicle (AV) platform will incorporate NVIDIA’s newly introduced Blackwell architecture, catering to transformer, large language models (LLM), and generative AI workloads, as unveiled by NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang at GTC.
Xinzhou Wu, NVIDIA’s Vice President of Automotive, emphasized the transformative impact of accelerated computing and generative AI on autonomy and the global transportation industry. He noted that while DRIVE Orin remains a preferred choice for current intelligent fleets, the industry is now moving towards integrating DRIVE Thor into their AI-enabled vehicle roadmaps for the future.
Several leading electric vehicle manufacturers, including BYD, Hyper, and XPENG, have revealed plans to base their next-generation AI vehicle fleets on DRIVE Thor. BYD aims to extend its collaboration with NVIDIA beyond vehicles to include cloud-based AI development and training, utilizing NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure along with the NVIDIA Isaac™ and NVIDIA Omniverse™ platforms. Hyper, a premium luxury brand, has chosen DRIVE Thor for its next-generation EVs slated for production in 2025 with level 4 driving capabilities. XPENG will employ DRIVE Thor as the AI core for its forthcoming EV fleets, enhancing its XNGP AI-assisted driving system.
Moreover, DRIVE Thor is set to empower various segments outside passenger vehicles, such as long-haul trucks, delivery vehicles, and robotaxis, where high-performance computing and AI are essential for safe and secure operations. Nuro, Plus, Waabi, and WeRide are among the companies at the forefront, integrating DRIVE Thor into their mobility solutions. These collaborations span from level 4 autonomous driving technologies and software solutions to generative AI-powered autonomous trucking and urban-centered autonomous driving applications.
Scheduled for production vehicles as early as the next year, DRIVE Thor leverages the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture, featuring a generative AI engine among other advanced capabilities, and boasts 1,000 teraflops of performance to ensure the safety and security of autonomous machines.
