News From atlatec, Volvo Trucks, Aurora, Polestar, And Volvo Cars

Hello Dear atlatec subscriber,

As usual at the end of each month, we’ve prepared a brief automotive news overview to help you to keep track of the hottest headlines.

This time, we’re especially happy to include some news of our own! Additionally, we found interesting developments at Volvo Trucks and their partnership with Aurora, the Polestar’s long-term commitment to the first climate-neutral EV, and Nvidia’s DRIVE Orin AI-computing platform, that Volvo Cars has opted to use for their AV.

I hope you enjoy the read and make sure to watch out latest fire-side chat that is already available on YouTube.

ADAS Testing: From Subjective Customer Preferences To Objective Validation At Scale — Via atlatec

While actual autonomous vehicles may still be a few years out, the L1/L2 ADAS domain is already going stronger than ever. That’s why we’re happy to publish some news of our own this week: A detailed look at a solution for ADAS validation that brings capabilities and fidelity previously limited to proving grounds to public road testing.

Take a look at this solution for creating and leveraging reference data at scale as it was piloted by Porsche and built together by atlatec and our partners GeneSys, MdynamiX and the Kempten University of Applied Sciences. We’re quite excited to share this and hope you will take an interest, too: If you have any thoughts, we’d love to hear them!

Volvo partners with Aurora to accelerate autonomous truck applications — Via Autonomous Vehicle International

Autonomous trucks are often regarded as perhaps the first instance of actual production AVs we’re likely to encounter on the open road. Reasons include the focus on (relatively non-comlex) highway routes, saving human drivers the grind of long-distance trips as well as the clear business case to be made in the logistics domain.

The latter, of course, relies on actual commercialization — towards which Volvo Trucks may have just taken another step, announcing a partnership with AV stack provider Aurora. The mutual goal: To bring autonomous hub-to-hub truck operations to North America — and thus bringing everyone a step closer to encountering actual AVs on public roads.

Polestar ‘will have to question everything’ in order to build the first climate-neutral EV — Via Tech Crunch

Basically every car maker and their suppliers are currently asking themselves, “How can we reduce carbon emissions a bit more — and perhaps offset the rest?” This is, of course, a relevant effort; and it continues to produce reductions for CO2, NOx and other emittents by a few percent every year (or at least every time a new emissions standard is announced).

However, instead of asking about 10% less, Geely-owned Polestar has chosen to question everything about themselves, aiming for 100% elimination of emissions — including not only the operations lifecycle of their new “Polestar 0” model, but also the entire supply chain and production, moving away from toxicity-related materials for chassis and batteries.

That asking bigger questions lead to bigger answers is something tech companies like Google have known for a long time (see “10X thinking”) — it will be exciting to see its effects on automotive and manufacturing, and whether others will follow suit!

Volvo Cars chooses Nvidia DRIVE Orin SoC for Highway Pilot AD system — Via Autonomous Vehicle International

More news from Sweden, and thus from Geely, who are also the proud owners of Volvo Cars: As was announced during NVIDIA’s GTC this month, the car maker has chosen their “DRIVE Orin” system to enable its passenger cars to drive themselves.

As Volvo Cars has previously announced, they’re skipping Level 3 entirely, instead aiming for L4 operations on highways as their debut on the autonomous vehicles stage. The first vehicle to come with the new NVIDIA SoC is the next-gen XC90; in which it will work hand in hand with ADAS software developed by Zenseact and LiDAR sensors supplied by Luminar.

Stay tuned for the atlatec industry newsletter coming at the end of May! In the meantime, feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions.

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