According to foreign media reports, Nvidia and Foxconn announced yesterday that they will cooperate to develop an autonomous vehicle platform.
Foxconn said it will manufacture electronic control units (ECUs) for automobiles based on Nvidia’s DRIVE-Orin chips, which will serve the global automotive market in the future. Electric vehicles (EVs) produced by Foxconn will feature the DRIVE Orin ECU and DRIVE Hyperion sensor architecture to enable highly automated driving functions.
It is reported that Nvidia’s DRIVE Orin chip was first released in 2019, and mass production was announced in March 2022. This chip is capable of 254 trillion operations per second. In theory, through continuous upgrading and expansion, it can support automakers to continuously upgrade their products to future L5 fully automatic driving systems. At present, Nvidia is also developing a new generation of DRIVE Thor vehicle-mounted computing platform, with a floating-point computing performance of 2,000 trillion times, and plans to start mass production in 2025.
Rishi Dhall, vice president of Nvidia’s automotive business, said that the cooperation with Foxconn will provide automakers with world-class intelligent driving solutions. In addition, based on the certified DRIVE Hyperion sensor suite, Foxconn will be able to promote its electric vehicle launch strategy and accelerate the implementation of time and cost strategies.
Eric Yeh, Senior Director of Foxconn Software Development Center, said: “Through the strategic cooperation with Nvidia, Foxconn will be able to provide more powerful intelligent driving solutions. The two parties will jointly help the industry create energy-efficient self-driving cars. The two parties have fully considered this, will use their respective unique advantages to strive for innovation and seize opportunities in the field of electric vehicle development.”
Foxconn’s electric vehicle business will accelerate this year. The company has released its own electric vehicle platform, as well as the Model E luxury sedan, Model C SUV, Model T electric bus and other models. It also produces electric vehicles for Lordstown Motors and has a contract with Fisker to produce a second model, the PEAR.
