“In the past, if firms were building a cheap car, they would use the cheapest chip they could.
“For medium cars they would use a medium-price chip, and for high-end cars they would use an expensive chip.
Then Tesla put high-performance chips in all their cars and focused on software,” he explains. “With a software-defined vehicle, you put the highest-performance computer and richest software in the car and over the life of the car keep upgrading it.”
It’s the same approach, notes Kani, that Apple takes with its iPhones. And while established car firms were slow to react to Tesla, Kani says the rise of Chinese newcomers “building really good self-driving software” has changed things: “There’s clearly a threat there. So now they’re thinking: ‘How do we make decisions faster?’”
Many car makers talk about dramatically shortening their development cycles to try to match the Chinese – but Kani says “we haven’t seen that”.
He adds: “In China, they make a new car every two years. Most [other] manufacturers are on a four- or five-year cadence. If your competition is upgrading every two years and you’re doing it once every four to five, they’re running circles around you.”
Kani notes that the first European car makers to sign up to use Nvidia’s Drive AGX Orin platform (essentially a ‘brain’ for autonomous vehicles) – Mercedes-Benz and Volvo – took several years to get the tech onto the road, whereas Chinese clients “had cars in production using it nine months later”.
Those European cars on Orin such as the Volvo EX90 are just launching now, but Nvidia rolled out the more powerful Drive AGX Thor platform in 2022, and there are cars on the road in China using it already.
“So you started at the same time, but by the time you launch your car, you’re behind on day one,” says Kani.
“When we talk to Dell, HP and Apple, they’re asking when our next computer is available, and then the launch of their next product [an iPhone, for example] is aligned to it.
