BYD Cars to Adopt NVIDIA Platform in 2023

NVIDIA, an artificial intelligence computing manufacturer based in the U.S., announced at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC 2022) on Tuesday night that it would partner with two new car companies: Chinese automaker BYD and American EV maker Lucid Group. NVIDIA said that its auto business revenue will reach about $11 billion in the next six years.

Shenzhen-based automobile company BYD also announced that from the first half of 2023, it will carry the NVIDIA Drive Hyperion platform on some of its new energy vehicles to realize intelligent driving and parking.

At the conference, NVIDIA revealed that its automated driving Orin system-on-chip (SoC) has officially been put into production and was launched this month. The company also unveiled the “DRIVE Hyperion 9,” a development platform and reference architecture for designing autonomous vehicles.

NVIDIA regards the Hyperion 9 platform as a central nervous system. Compared with the previous platform, the number of sensing hardware supported by the company has greatly increased, including 14 cameras, nine millimeter wave radars, three lidars and 20 ultrasonic sensors outside the car, together with three cameras and one millimeter wave radar inside the car. Vehicles equipped with Hyperion 9 will be able to achieve L4 automated driving capability.

The NVIDIA Drive Orin has a computing power of 254 TOPS (trillion operations per second). It has a high-speed peripheral interface and high memory bandwidth (205GB/s), and can seamlessly process data from multiple sensor configurations to achieve safe and reliable autonomous driving.

SEE ALSO: BYD Invests in Lithium Developer Chengxin Lithium

Rishi Dhall, Vice President of Automotive at NVIDIA, said: “Software-defined autonomy and electrification are some of the driving forces behind the automotive industry’s transformation. Through the power of AI and the NVIDIA DRIVE platform, BYD will deliver software-defined EV fleets that are not only safe and reliable but also improve over time.”

BYD has now become the leading brand of new energy vehicles in China. In 2021, it achieved nearly 600,000 units of global sales of new energy passenger cars, and its cumulative production and sales of new energy vehicles exceeded 1.5 million units.