Even Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) take rate may not be high, Tesla is still leading the production at scale. For example, there could be 63K FSD users for a 10% take rate from 627K Tesla cars delivered in Q1-Q3 2021. While other carmakers still have a long way to catch up, NVIDIA is here to spare them from “reinventing the brain”.
A new brain
In Nov. 2021, NVIDIA announced DRIVE Orin SoC, one chip to rule 4 domains: cluster, information, passenger interaction/monitoring & autonomous driving. With the growing number of customers, such as Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, NIO, etc. adopting, cars may be smarter, powered by the new brain earlier.
Leveling up
Inevitably, the smarter cars will be powered by general-purpose computers, and most functionalities will be software-defined. So that innovation can be added, refined & iterated quickly. Obviously, NVIDIA has a bigger ambition to level up its game. NVIDIA is providing not only a full-stack development platform: NVIDIA DRIVE HYPERION, but also end-to-end solutions for autonomous vehicles: NVIDIA DRIVE.
There are challenges for NVIDIA to fit this properly in its main business models. After all, it’s very hard for a chipset vendor make it platform go mainstream. Because the SW platform & ecosystem adoptions take much more & different magics than those making successful =products. For example, it takes Intel & Microsoft to establish Wintel PC ecosystem.
Vertical or horizontal
It hardly sees any “Tesla killer” on the horizon, because no one company has vertically integrated such deeply as Tesla, “the Apple of self-driving”. Not even Apple itself yet 😉.
However, as the tech progresses, horizontal integration may become the necessary alternative to scale & level the playing field. The question is how well NVIDIA & its customers execute. Let’s wait & see how the story unfolds 🍿
Thank you for reading & happy 2022 🎇.
Full Disclosure
The opinions stated here are my own, not those of my company. They are mostly extrapolations from public information. I don’t have insider knowledge of those companies, nor a whatever expert.
