Within the last week, we’ve had two key announcements about self-driving trucks. One leader in autonomous driving tech is pushing its technology ahead, while another is pulling its plans back, and these two companies have been linked in the not-so-distant past. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said late Friday that they have pushed back their electric semi-truck unveiling a bit, partially due to the production bottleneck with the Model 3.
However, the NVIDIA self-driving truck and taxi technology pushed the company’s stock to a new record high on Tuesday. The news echoes some of what Deutsche Bank analysts said in a report last month regarding semiconductor companies and autonomous driving tech, which is probably why NVIDIA stock hit a record high. The race is on among self-driving tech firms to reach Level Five fully autonomous vehicles, and NVIDIA is a bit like David in the fight against Goliath, the little guy up against much bigger rivals.
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CNBC’s Jim Cramer seems to agree, as he said on the TV network’s “Mad Dash” segment that the hardware for the NVIDIA self-driving truck “is going to change everything.” The chip maker has packed the power of 100 data center servers into a device that’s the size of a license plate. The device can compute 320 trillion operations a second.
There are many applications that this device could be used for, but self-driving cars is the obvious possibility. The chip maker claims that it is the first artificial intelligence computer system that’s capable of driving robo-taxis that are fully autonomous. Further, the company plans to build a fleet of NVIDIA self-driving trucks based on the computer system, which it calls Pegasus. NVIDIA said that Pegasus is designed for “truly level 5 driving,” which means that the vehicles won’t even have a steering wheel or gas or brake pedal.
NVIDIA is partnering with several companies to build robo-taxis, although it wouldn’t name any of them. In addition to Pegasus, the chip maker also announced today that it’s working with the automotive supplier ZF to build a test fleet of autonomous trucks for Deutsche Post DHL Group, the biggest delivery and mail service in the world.
