Automated car tech to hit the streets in two years: Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia

Cars that drive themselves are closer to becoming a reality than it appears.
Automated car tech to hit the streets in two years: Jen-Hsun Huang, NvidiaCars that drive themselves are closer to becoming a reality than it appears. Ask Jen-Hsun Huang, the chief executive and cofounder of chipmaker Nvidia, how long it could take for autonomous vehicles to ply on the streets and the answer is: about two years.

"Every car company in the world will have to invest in autonomous driving or they will become the Nokia of phones," said Huang, an engineer who founded Nvidia in 1993. The $4.68 billion company, which manufactures graphics processing units and chips for mobile phones, also supplies high speed processors to major automakers like Audi and Tesla. "In the next couple of years, depending on country and regulations, the technology for autonomous cars will be available," he said. Indeed, Tesla Motors recently announced addition of many self driving features to one of its cars.

Although Tesla's cars aren't completely autonomous, the latest Model X is designed to reduce human intervention. For instance, at the charging station, the charger automatically identifies the car's input and plugs into it by its own. Its doors open on their own when a human approaches and it can switch lane, auto pilot or park itself.

However, fully automated vehicles are still some time away. For instance, it is tough to predict human behaviour on the road and autonomous vehicles could get confused. "There is a lot of development that needs to go into autonomous vehicles. But there is no question in my mind that this is going to save lives," said Huang. Countries like the Netherlands, Japan and Singapore are already ahead of others when it comes to making use of autonomous vehicles, he pointed out.

Like automakers, companies like Nvidia are also forced to change themselves to guard against technology disruption. Nvidia, for instance, is moving away from being a pure play component company to a company that offers solutions on the cloud. "The future of computing is moving to the cloud," said Huang.

"Our Tesla processors are already in the cloud. It works on the cloud computing platform of Amazon, IBM and Microsoft, so startups can start using one of these three and applications can be fast and magical," he said.

Huang, who visits India twice every year, and recently inaugurated a larger facility for the company in Pune, said India can expect wide scale changes if some infrastructure issues were fixed.

"India needs more than anything affordable and available broadband. If all regulations and policy makers can at least do that, it will be the beginning of a lot of great things," he said. Nvidia employs nearly 2,000 people in India and nearly 9,000 people worldwide.

Huang, who also met Indian startups on this trip, said the ecosystem has matured in two years with more venture capital and rich talent pool. "Startups are cropping out of the wood works. This may be India's decade," he said.


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