Volvo picks three Nvidia products for hands-free city driving before the end of the decade

The customer here is a driver on a city street who lets the car take a turn and keeps supervising it. The Verge compares the system to Tesla's Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and calls it partially automated ^[1]. Nvidia's Ali Kani told the Verge it will also resemble the system Mercedes-Benz rolled out on the all-new CLA sedan ^[11]. That puts two automakers, Volvo and Mercedes-Benz, on a similar Nvidia design ^[20].

Volvo is deepening a supplier relationship that TechCrunch calls nearly a decade old ^[12]. Alwin Bakkenes, who runs software for Volvo, told TechCrunch the company will "standardize more on Hyperion" and will do so for the sensor set too ^[18].

Volvo does not describe this as outsourcing. "Automakers used to be very much like car-line based development and working with various suppliers, etc. and we have completely changed and migrated into being a full tech stack company," Bakkenes said ^[17]. The layers Volvo adds sit on the driver side. Its proprietary driver-understanding systems analyze driver behavior in considerably greater detail than a basic driver monitoring system, Bakkenes told the Verge ^[15]. Its connected safety technology lets vehicles exchange information about hazards and conditions ahead, including roadworks ^[16].

The Verge reports that Volvo is trying to correct some failed automated driving projects. Ride Pilot, its Level 3 unsupervised system, was effectively sidelined in the US after Volvo failed to obtain regulatory approval, and a plan to add lidar to some models fell away when supplier Luminar went bankrupt ^[5].

Kani's case for the product is commercial. He said point-to-point driving may prove more valuable than a system limited to highway assistance, and that Nvidia sees the partnership as a way to help Volvo build a business model around ongoing software-based offerings ^[21]. Volvo plans to offer the system across its lineup, from entry-level to high-end ^[8]. Neither the Mercedes system nor any other has usage, retention or time-to-value figures in the reports.

For anyone weighing a similar vendor deal, we'd sort each layer of the stack on two axes: whether a competitor can buy the same layer, and whether the customer feels it in use. A layer a competitor can buy and the customer cannot feel is a buy. A layer the customer feels and a competitor cannot copy is a build. The other two cells need a named owner, because those are the calls most likely to go wrong. Volvo's split fits the sort. The driving layer has a similar counterpart at Mercedes-Benz ^[11], and the driver-understanding layer is Volvo's own ^[15]. The tradeoff is that driving behavior in a Volvo will come from a design another brand also ships in similar form, so in our view any difference a driver notices has to come from the layers Volvo keeps.