Auto giants form autonomous car think tank

TOYOTA and General Motors have joined with tech and automotive supply heavyweights to form a consortium to accelerate and unify autonomous driving technologies for mass production.

Bosch, Denso, Continental, Arm, NVIDIA and NXP Semiconductors are also included in the initial membership of the group that says it will welcome other industry players to join.

Called Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium (AVCC), the group plans to pool its autonomous vehicle knowledge “to promote scalable deployment of automated and autonomous vehicles”.

In a statement released in California’s Silicon Valley, AVCC said the collaboration aims to solve some of the most significant challenges holding up mass deployment of autonomous vehicles.

“The first step toward achieving this vision and the common objective of AVCC is to develop a set of recommendations of a system architecture and a computing platform that reconciles the performance requirements of autonomous systems with the vehicle-specific requirements and limitations in terms of size, temperature range, power consumption and safety,” the statement says.

“These recommendations will be specially developed to move autonomous vehicles from today’s prototype systems to deployment at scale.”

AVCC’s board will be chaired by GM R&D’s lab group manager, Massimo Osella, who said the massive amount of technological innovation required to power fully self-driving vehicles at scale required collaboration at an industry level.

“As the AVCC, we are working together to create the ‘go to‘ organisation for autonomous computing expertise to help bring this technology to market,” he said.

The consortium says it plans to publicly share its results, saying: “Working groups will share ideas and study common technological challenges, facilitating cross-industry collaboration to help the automotive industry work together by defining, educating and publishing for the benefit of all.”

Each of the consortium members brings a different talents to the project, with NVIDIA offering expertise on artificial intelligence.

A separate consortium to develop safety strategies around autonomous driving already exists. It also includes GM and Toyota, along with Ford, Daimler, SAE International and Uber.