Top automakers sign on to use the tech giant’s Drive Hyperion platform as its robotaxi plans expand worldwide.
Nvidia says its latest autonomous-driving platform is gaining traction with several major automakers and mobility companies, as the steady march towards fully self-driving vehicles continues to gain momentum.
Today, at Nvidia’s GTC conference in San Jose, CEO Jensen Huang announced that the Nvidia Drive Hyperion platform will underpin upcoming Level 4-capable vehicles from Hyundai, Nissan, BYD, and Geely. These car makers join previously announced OEMs including Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and GM.the only Level 3 system currently approved for use in North America—Mercedes-Benz’s Drive Pilot —does not run on Nvidia hardware, though Mercedes uses Nvidia Drive AV software for its enhanced Level 2 system thatThe announcement is an update to the news Nvidia made at its GTC event in Washington D.C. in October of 2025, where Huang announced that Nvidia is partnering with Uber and multiple automakers to develop and deploy 100,000 self-driving taxis and delivery vehicles in the coming years.While you may remember Nvidia as the maker of the graphics card for your PC that made for super sick gaming, it has evolved into the leading supplier of high-performance graphics processing units and so much more, including but not limited to the chips that support supercomputers, cloud computing, data centers, all forms of AI, robots, and of course, advanced driver assistance systems , and eventually, fully autonomous cars. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang showing off some of the many physical AI agents, aka robots, including autonomous cars. Drive is Nvidia’s platform for building the latter, and includes the computers, software, and AI tools that help vehicles perceive the world around them, understand what is happening and make driving decisions. Several automakers including Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Jaguar Land Rover, BYD, and Geely have signed on to use these tools to create advanced driver-assistance and autonomous systems.So what is Hyperion? Essentially the blueprint for how to build an autonomous driving system using the Drive. In industry speak, it’s called the reference design or architecture, and it shows automakers how to combine the Drive computing platform with cameras, radar, lidar, and other hardware in a working vehicle setup. This helps companies develop autonomous cars faster because they don’t have to design the whole system from scratch. The idea is to give manufacturers a standardized starting point, reducing development time and helping companies spread autonomous systems across multiple vehicles and markets. The big news from GTC 2026 San Jose is that Hyundai, Nissan, BYD, and Geely are developing next-generation autonomous vehicles using the platform’s compute and sensor architecture, while Isuzu is working with Japanese autonomous technology company TIER IV on a Level 4 autonomous bus project powered by Nvidia’s Drive AGX Thor system-on-a-chip.Nvidia also announced an expansion of its robotaxi ambitions via several partnerships. Nvidia’s biggest partner, Uber, plans to deploy autonomous vehicles using the full Nvidia Drive software stack across 28 markets on four continents by 2028. The rollout is expected to begin in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area in the first half of 2027. According to Nvidia, other ride-hailing and mobility companies, including Lyft, Bolt , Grab , are also developing autonomous vehicle programs using the Drive Hyperion platform. A key component of the platform is a new operating system called Nvidia Halos. The software is designed to provide a unified safety architecture for AI-driven vehicles. Built on the company’s DriveOS system, Halos integrates safety monitoring and applications into a three-layer framework intended to meet strict automotive safety standards. Nvidia says the system also incorporates an active safety stack designed to meet five-star New Car Assessment Program ratings.This is Nvidia’s image for Alpamayo, which doesn’t tell you much, but breaks up this text quite nicely. To support autonomous vehicle development, Nvidia also introduced an update to Alpamayo, its AI-driven “vision-language-action” model that debuted at CES 2025. Called Alpamayo 1.5, the system is designed to help vehicles interpret their surroundings and plan driving actions. It takes inputs such as video from vehicle cameras, navigation instructions, and recent driving history, then generates possible driving paths while providing reasoning for its decisions. Developers can adjust vehicle behavior using prompts or navigation constraints. VLA models like Alpamayo are increasingly becoming the buzz for the future of autonomous driving, as they aim to move beyond mere sensing the world and reacting by creating AI-driven models that can sense, understand, and articulate why driving decisions are being madeThe company says the model can help autonomous systems learn from rare or unpredictable scenarios, such as unusual road hazards or unexpected human behavior. To help validate those systems before they reach public roads, Nvidia also highlighted a simulation tool called Omniverse NuRec. The technology reconstructs real-world environments using captured driving data, allowing developers to test autonomous vehicles in detailed virtual scenarios. Companies such as 51WORLD, dSPACE, Foretellix, and Parallel Domain are already integrating the tool into their development pipelines, while the University of Michigan’s Mcity test facility is building a digital twin of its track using the technology. Together, Nvidia says its multitude of hardware, software, AI models, and simulation tools are intended to form a complete development ecosystem for autonomous vehicles as automakers and mobility companies continue advancing toward large-scale deployment.Get the newest car reviews, hottest auto news, and expert analysis of the latest trends delivered straight to your inbox!I used to go kick tires with my dad at local car dealerships. I was the kid quizzing the sales guys on horsepower and 0-60 times, while Dad wandered around undisturbed. When the salesmen finally cornered him, I'd grab as much of the glossy product literature as I could carry. One that still stands out to this day: the beautiful booklet on the Mitsubishi Eclipse GSX that favorably compared it to the Porsches of the era. I would pore over the prose, pictures, specs, trim levels, even the fine print, never once thinking that I might someday be responsible for the asterisked figures"*as tested by Motor Trend magazine." My parents, immigrants from Hong Kong, worked their way from St. Louis, Missouri to sunny Camarillo, California, in the early 1970s. Along the way, Dad managed to get us into some interesting, iconic family vehicles, including a 1973 Super Beetle , 1976 Volvo 240, the 1977 Chevrolet Caprice Classic station wagon, and 1984 VW Vanagon. Dad imbued a love of sports cars and fast sedans as well. I remember sitting on the package shelf of his 1981 Mazda RX-7, listening to him explain to my Mom - for Nth time - what made the rotary engine so special. I remember bracing myself for the laggy whoosh of his turbo diesel Mercedes-Benz 300D, and later, his '87 Porsche Turbo. We were a Toyota family in my coming-of-age years. At 15 years and 6 months, I scored 100 percent on my driving license test, behind the wheel of Mom's 1991 Toyota Previa. As a reward, I was handed the keys to my brother's 1986 Celica GT-S. Six months and three speeding tickets later, I was booted off the family insurance policy and into a 1983 Toyota 4x4 . It took me through the rest of college and most of my time at USC, where I worked for the Daily Trojan newspaper and graduated with a biology degree and business minor. Cars took a back seat during my stint as a science teacher for Teach for America. I considered a third year of teaching high school science, coaching volleyball, and helping out with the newspaper and yearbook, but after two years of telling teenagers to follow their dreams, when I wasn't following mine, I decided to pursue a career in freelance photography. After starving for 6 months, I was picked up by a tiny tuning magazine in Orange County that was covering"The Fast and the Furious" subculture years before it went mainstream. I went from photographer-for-hire to editor-in-chief in three years, and rewarded myself with a clapped-out 1989 Nissan 240SX. I subsequently picked up a 1985 Toyota Land Cruiser to haul parts and camera gear. Both vehicles took me to a more mainstream car magazine, where I first sipped from the firehose of press cars. Soon after, the Land Cruiser was abandoned. After a short stint there, I became editor-in-chief of the now-defunct Sport Compact Car just after turning 30. My editorial director at the time was some long-haired dude with a funny accent named Angus MacKenzie. After 18 months learning from the best, Angus asked me to join Motor Trend as senior editor. That was in 2007, and I've loved every second ever since.
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