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Joining the growing list of tech companies investing in self-driving cars is famed graphics chip maker NVidia. The company was also just given the green light to operate tests for their self-driving technology in California.
As Ubergizmo notes, NVidia is not a company that makes cars, but their products have been known to make it to accessories and gadgets made for cars. Now, the dominating force in the GPU industry wants to do the same with the autonomous driving market, and it’s starting with road tests after getting the approval of the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Right now, there are several companies on the list of approved test requests by the DMV, but NVidia is one of the few that actually went ahead with putting an actual vehicle on the road. This makes it on-par with Tesla, Google, Ford, and GM.
In terms of the technology onboard the vehicle that it is testing out right now, much of it was developed by the company’s engineers. However, NVidia has also announced its partnership with China’s Baidu, which is basically the country’s equivalent to Google. The purpose of the partnership is to advance research into artificial intelligence.
As for the car tests, The Verge reports that NVidia already has wheels on the road. The publication received photos sent by one of its readers featuring a black and green vehicle with the company’s logo plastered on the side.
It would seem that this vehicle already has the company’s custom computer vision technology called the Drive PX2. NVidia has already showcased the capabilities of this technology with regards to semi-autonomous driving, including the test runs it did in private lots prior to getting the DMV approval.
In any case, it’s clear from the way that companies have been flocking to the state and been getting approval that California is now the go-to state for applying self-driving technology. Other states including Michigan are already warming up to the idea, which can only be good for the autonomous driving industry.
