On Monday, Nvidia Corporation (NVDA) - Get Report announced that it's partnering with one of the largest automotive tech companies, Continental AG, to create a "top-to-bottom AI self-driving vehicle system." 

The system will be built on Nvidia's Drive platform. The company's current platforms have been leading the charge when it comes to autonomous driving. It dominated the Detroit Auto Show in January, as self-driving cars and AI features (now coming inside the car cabin) were featured all throughout the show.

In this particular partnership, Nvidia is aiming for full-on Level 5 capability. From the press release:

"The partnership will enable the production of AI computer systems that scale from automated Level 2 features through full Level 5 self-driving capabilities, where the vehicle has no steering or pedals." They plan to introduce the product in 2021. 

Where do the companies' leaders see autonomous driving going?

"The vehicle of the future will be a sensing, planning and acting computer on wheels. The complexity of autonomous driving requires nothing less than the full computational horsepower of an AI supercomputer," said Dr. Elmar Degenhart, CEO of Continental.

"We now have all the key elements in place to take AI self-driving cars from development to mass production," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia.

Dr. Elmar Degenhart, CEO of Continental and Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang.

In essence, the partnership is fusing Continental's sensor technology -- including radar, cameras and high resolution 3-D Lidar -- with Nvidia's intense processing power. In fact, its Xavier platform can deliver 30 trillion operations per seconds while consuming just 30 watts of energy.

"This unprecedented level of performance is necessary to handle the massive amount of data processing that self-driving vehicles must perform," the company said. "These include running deep neural networks to sense surroundings, understand the environment, localize the vehicle on an HD map, predict the behavior and position of other objects, compute vehicle dynamics and plan a safe path forward."

Let's see if this news is enough to give Nvidia a lift on Monday. The stock suffered a nasty selloff on Friday, as did most of the market, and was down roughly 2.3% in Monday's premarket trading session. The company reports earnings after the close on February 8th. 


More on TheStreet from the Detroit Auto Show:
