NVIDIA adds Bolt, Volvo and Mercedes to its self-driving platform

Bolt, the mobility company that wants to run robotaxis in Europe, will use NVIDIA's driving software in its future Lucid vehicles. NVIDIA announced the deal Wednesday at GTC Berlin, along with other partners for Hyperion, its computing and sensor platform for autonomous driving. Hyperion is not a consumer product but the technical base that carmakers build into their vehicles.

Bolt plans to deploy at least 25 000 Level 4 Lucids, which drive without a human in defined zones, and to start collecting driving data in Madrid in 2027, provided it wins regulatory approval.

The schedule faces another hurdle. When the partnership was announced Sept. 17, no order had been placed and no money had changed hands, according to TechCrunch. Lucid had also pushed back the first vehicle on that platform by almost a year, to the second half of 2027.

Volvo Cars is adopting Hyperion and the Alpamayo Stack software. Mercedes-Benz is expanding its alliance to develop Level 3 and Level 4 driving, and NVIDIA says the carmaker's urban assistance system, MB.DRIVE ASSIST PRO, will get approval in Germany "soon." Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles is showing its ID. Buzz AD van, and Einride is preparing freight trucks.

NVIDIA also introduced Halos SAFE, a validation framework that combines simulation and track testing to leave traceable safety evidence, with dSPACE, IVEX and TÜV Rheinland involved in the assessment. It also unveiled Alpamayo 2 Edge, a 2-billion-parameter reasoning model meant to run inside the car and designed to work at 10 Hz, or ten cycles per second.

The savings figures come from the company. Using Porsche's data flow, NVIDIA says, repeated physical tests could drop by up to 90% and development cycles by up to 85%. These are projections with no independent evaluation.

CEO Jensen Huang calls robotaxis "the first mass-market application" of robotics and physical AI. His Alpamayo Agentic Factory, an open blueprint for training and evaluating with AI agents, is due in early 2027.