Industries partner to push for self-driving
AI, auto aim to reduce cost, encourage demand
By: Abhirup Roy
Reuters
LOS VEGAS - The short history of the self-driving car industry has been littered with expensive failures and endless delays, but tech suppliers, chipmakers including Nvidia and some automakers are betting on AI and a web of partnerships to spark new progress.
.....
Many interested automakers, however, still have major questions. Apart from concerns about high costs and scalability, they want to know if there is enough customer demand to make money out of any expensive wager.
..... Vehicles that drive themselves would change the transportation landscape, but making such a technology safe for public roads has been harder and much more expensive than expected. while a few companies such as Alphabet's Wayno and Tesla have decided to do it themselves, veterans such as General Motors and Ford Motor have abandoned their-in-house effort for fully autonomous vehicles.
..... At the CES show in Las Vegas last week, [01/05-09/2026] AWS and German supplier Aumovio announced a deal to support the commercial roll-out of self-driving vehicles, while autonomous truck firm Kodiak AI and Bosch said they have partnered to ramp up manufacturing of autonomous trucking hardware and sensors.
..... AI chip company Nvidia rolled out its next-generation platform which will be sued in a robotaxi alliance announced by Lucid Group, Nuro and Uber. Powered by Nvidia's chips, Mercedes-Benz said this week [01/12/2026 launch a new advanced drive-assistance system in the United States later this year [2026] that lets its vehicles operate autonomous on city streets under driver supervision.
.... The propulsive force behind self-driving technology - artificial intelligence - is also coming into its own as a development tool, offering hopes of mitigating high costs.
..... AI and generative AI are acting as a "big accelerate" for the industry "because it actually allows ... a significant amount of development and validation with significantly fewer resources," said Ozgur Tohumcu, general manager for automotive and manufacturing at Amazon's cloud unit amazon Web services. Western automakers are also under pressure to keep up with China's push to lead the development and adoption of autonomous driving.
.....
In December, [2025] the Chinese government approved two cars with level 3 autonomous capabilities, which allows hands-off driving. The auto industry has defined five levels of autonomous driving, from cruise control at Level 1 to fully self-driving, without a human minder needed, at Level 5.
..... Still, Jochen Hanebeck, CEO of German chip-maker Infineon, cautioned against "market fantasy" that somehow fully self-driving cars could become commonplace within a few years.
..... Rather than risk fresh investments in full self-driving major automakers want revenue-generating driver assistance technology, known as Level 2, that is already available but requires drivers to pay constant attention, he said.
..... "I don't see, really now, a tsunami flowing toward Level 5," Hanbeck said. In recent months there has been a flurry of small robotax deployment announced in China, the United States, Europe and the Middle East, but Jeremy McClain, head of system and software at aumovio's autonomous mobility unit, said that expanding the area they cover requires more data, fleets and logistics, "which is costly and expensive."
..... The self-driving car industry is long on hype. Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised in 2019 that a year later the electric vehicle maker would have a million self-driving cares on the road. but Tesla launched a small robotaxe trial service only last year, [2025] bold prediction.
..... The problem was that cars face billions of potential unexpected incidents, or "edge cases," that can easily fool self-driving vehicles. One example often touted by experts is that if a human driver sees a ball rolling into the street, they automatically slow because it might be pursued by a child - but a self-driving care will react only when it sees the child. After the first self-driving bubble burst, major automakers including Ford and GM abandoned mosey-losing autonomous vehicle units. The demise of GM's Cruise was accelerated by an incident in which it struck and dragged a pedestrian 20 feet.
..... But Ali Kani, general manager of the automotive team at Nvidia, said AI has enabled advances to address key weakness in self-driving technology.
..... "There's some foundational pieces of technology that make us feel like we're there," Kani said.
.....
Morgan Stanley analysts in a note an CES said that while Nvidia's new Aplamayo platform for self-driving would give legacy car-makers a leg up and help them pressure Tesla, the EV maker was years ahead. That said, many in the industry see Nvidia, whose platform for Tesla ravels to gather.