Chinese Nio unveils Tesla Model Y competitor with autopilot on NVIDIA chips
Today, the Chinese company Nio announced a premium ET7 electric car with an autopilot system based on the Adam supercomputer on NVIDIA Drive Orin chips.
The Adam supercomputer used in the electric vehicle includes four NVIDIA Drive Orin chips – a total of 48 Cortex-A78 cores, 256 tensor cores for artificial intelligence, and 8096 CUDA cores. All this together forms 68 billion transistors. This computing system is needed for the autopilot, which Nio claims is superior to Tesla’s autonomous driving system.
The first two NVIDIA Drive Orin chips process information from vehicle sensors. They are capable of processing up to 8 gigabytes of data per second. The third Orin is a backup chip for safety, in case something goes wrong with the first two. The fourth chip trains artificial intelligence on the go to adapt the autopilot system according to individual settings and the environment. As noted by NVIDIA in its press release, such a computing system, coupled with 33 external sensors designed to capture the situation around the car, is able to enable the car to autonomously move from point A to point B without any driver intervention.
The number of sensors that the car is equipped with includes eleven 8-megapixel Aquila Sensinc photosensors (for comparison, Tesla electric vehicles have a resolution of only 1.2 megapixels) and a LIDAR sensor with a 1550 nm laser and a viewing angle of 120 degrees and a range of up to 500 meters. …
“NIO’s proprietary self-driving algorithms, powered by four of the industry’s best Nvidia Orin processors, deliver unprecedented performance – over a quadrillion operations per second, ” said Nio CEO William Lee.
As noted by Reuters, the Nio ET7 is a kind of Chinese analogue of the Tesla Model Y. At the presentation, Nio CEO William Lee said that the electric car will have a range of more than 1000 km. The Nio ET7 is equipped with a 480 kW electrical system, which gives 653 hp, which accelerates the car to 100 km / h in 3.9 seconds. Car owners in China will have the opportunity to call on a special battery replacement station and, instead of recharging, simply replace the discharged battery with a new one.
Nio ET7 deliveries are due to begin in late 2022. The cost of an electric vehicle complete with a 70 kWh battery is $ 69,000 excluding subsidies. This amount includes a lifetime warranty, the ability to use the services of battery replacement stations and some kind of service outside the city. There is also an option to purchase the Nio ET7 without batteries for $ 58,000, but in this case, you will have to pay a subscription ($ 151 per month) for renting batteries. Autopilot also works by subscription, for using it the owner will have to fork out $ 105 per month.
