XPENG Motors forges strategic partnership with NVIDIA for Level 3 autonomous driving

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- On November 21, XPENG Motors signed a tripartite strategic cooperation agreement with NVIDIA, a leading company in AI computing hardware domain, and Desay SV Automotive to jointly develop Level 3 autonomous driving technology applicable to China's traffic environment and driving scenarios.

Based on the cooperation on hardware, three parties will also collectively work on the data collection and standardization, software development as well as training on cloud, etc. 

The EV startup will independently develop an autonomous driving software system specially designed for China's road conditions using NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Xavier processors and join hands with Desay SV to develop the hardware for the computing platform supporting autonomous driving.

According to the planning, XPENG Motors intends to launch autonomous driving features in phases, beginning with the Level 3 feature in new models from 2020, so as to gradually achieve such functions as fully autonomous driving for various urban traffic scenarios, automatic parking, traffic jam pilot, automatic lane change on highways and best route selection, etc.

Launched in early 2018, the Xavier processer developed by NVIDIA is the world's first mass-produced tailor-made processor designed for advanced autonomous driving. Powered by the Xavier, NVIDIA's DRIVE AGX AI platform is able to process the data from vehicle radars, cameras and ultrasonic system in real time and drive Level 2 and higher-level autonomous driving system via the robotaxis. DRIVE Xavier puts more processing power to work using less energy, delivering 30 trillion operations per second while consuming just 30 watts, according to NVIDIA's official blog.