BYD's autopilot will strengthen its cooperation with Nvidia or be used for high-end brands.

On March 23, BYD announced a partnership with Nvidia (NVIDIA) in smart driving technology. Starting from the first half of 2023, BYD will install Nvidia Drive Hyperion platform on some of its new energy vehicles to achieve intelligent driving and smart parking.

"the autopilot platform (Drive Hyperion 8 platform) launched by Nvidia this time is a perfection of the previous scheme and provides a complete set of upgradeable solutions for car companies." A senior practitioner in the chip industry commented on this.

It is worth mentioning that the industry has previously released a BYD product planning table, in which BYD high-end brands will launch four products one after another in 2023, which is also consistent with the boarding time of the above-mentioned Nvidia platform. Accordingly, some people in the industry believe that the platform may be used in BYD's upcoming high-end brand models. BYD did not respond to this for the time being.

At GTC 2022, Nvidia also unveiled the company's latest self-driving technology platform, Drive Hyperion 9, and announced that BYD and other electric vehicle manufacturers will adopt the platform architecture.

According to reports, the new Drive Hyperion 9 platform will be put into use in 2026. The architecture includes 14 cameras, 9 radars, 3 lidar sensors and 20 ultrasonic sensors outside the vehicle, as well as 3 cameras and one radar inside the vehicle. Through the combination of sensor groups and high-performance computing, the vehicle equipped with Hyperion will be able to achieve L4 autopilot capability, and the architecture of the whole system can also achieve functional security and network security.

In the cooperation between the two sides, BYD will use Nvidia DRIVE Orin chip, its computing power is 254TOPS. However, Nvidia said in a statement on the same day that, Drive Hyperion is intergenerational compatible and that auto partners can seamlessly migrate from self-driving car chip "DRIVE Orin" to a more powerful chip "DRIVE Atlan" or a future higher version.

Among Nvidia's customers, there is no shortage of Chinese car companies. Among them, car-building new forces head car company "Wei Xiaoli" are Nvidia's partners. Xiaopeng P7 is the first mass production model equipped with Nvidia DRIVE AGX Xavier computing platform, and Xiaopeng's next-generation intelligent pure electric model will continue to cooperate with Nvidia; ideal car announced in 2020 that it will take the lead in using the most powerful product in NVIDIA Orin system-level chips on the full-size add-on intelligent SUV launched in 2022, and this car is the ideal L9 for the newly announced name. Adam, the supercomputing platform of ET7, carries four Nvidia NVIDIA DRIVE Orin chips.

In the face of "rising stars", BYD may also be aware of its situation in the field of self-driving and is making up for this deficiency by expanding its "circle of friends".

On Feb. 25, Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily reported that BYD will choose Baidu as its self-driving supplier. Baidu provides BYD with integrated ANP smart driving products and man-machine co-driving maps. It is reported that Baidu's smart driving team has entered the market ahead of time to cooperate with BYD for development and will soon achieve mass production of cooperative models; on the same day, intelligent lidar system technology company RoboSense (Suiteng Juchuang) announced a new round of strategic financing, including BYD and other investors. Earlier, BYD completed its strategic investment in the horizon. In addition, BYD and Momenta official Xuan established Shenzhen Dipai Zhihang Technology Co., Ltd.

"at present, there are not many smart driving solutions for car companies to choose from, and once a supplier is selected, it will not be easily changed." In addition, the head of the market of a domestic self-driving chip start-up said that because of the problems of cost and product development cycle, the mainframe factory hopes that the solutions provided by its partners are upgradeable and evolutionable. this can not only meet the differentiated needs of customers, but also save a lot of costs. "at the same time, car companies generally choose multiple (self-driving) suppliers according to brand and vehicle positioning."

In the view of people in the industry, the Baidu line-parking integrated intelligent driving product ANP2.0, which will be mass produced and loaded in June this year, targets customers for low-and middle-end models of 100000-200000 yuan, covering parking lots and highway application scenes, while Nvidia Drive Hyperion 8's self-driving platform is more suitable for products with a higher price range because of its brand and cost factors. It can also be inferred that BYD chose Nvidia to prepare for the high-end brand it will launch.

In addition to Baidu and Invid, BYD is also in talks with Horizon about the loading of the latter Expedition 5 (J5), but it is not clear how it will work with Horizon. Before completing the investment in the horizon and reaching a strategic partnership, the two sides said they would jointly develop a basic technology platform composed of "chip + algorithm + tool chain".