Nvidia Drive Hyperion platform passes key safety assessments for autonomous vehicles

Nvidia today announced that its autonomous vehicle (AV) platform, Nvidia Drive AGX Hyperion, has passed industrial safety assessments by TÜV SÜD and TÜV Rheinland – two of the leading companies in the industry.
authorities for automotive-level safety and cybersecurity.

This achievement raises the bar for AV safety, innovation and performance, Nvidia said during Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's keynote at CES 2025the big tech trade show in Las Vegas this week.

Drive Hyperion is the industry's end-to-end autonomous driving platform. It includes the Drive AGX system-on-a-chip (SoC) and reference board design, the Nvidia DriveOS automotive operating system, a sensor array, and an active safety and level 2+ drive stack.

Automotive safety pioneers such as Mercedes-Benz, JLR and Volvo Cars are adopting the platform, which is designed to be modular, so customers can easily deploy what they need. It is also scalable and built to be upgradeable and compatible across future DRIVE SoC generations.

Available in the first half of this year, the latest version of Drive Hyperion – designed for both passenger and commercial vehicles – will feature the high-performance Drive AGX Thor SoC built on the Nvidia Blackwell architecture .

“A billion vehicles drive trillions of miles every year moving the world. With autonomous vehicles – one of the largest robotics markets – now here, the Nvidia Blackwell-powered platform will shift this revolution into high gear,” said Huang. “The next wave of autonomous devices will rely on physical AI world-base models to understand and interact with the real world, and Nvidia Drive is purpose-built for this new era, which 'delivering unparalleled operational safety and AI.'

Forward driving safety: Proven proof for next-generation vehicles

Next-generation vehicles will be increasingly software-based, able to acquire new features and functionality over their lifetime. Tapping into Nvidia's 15,000 engineering years invested in vehicle safety, DRIVE Hyperion will help ensure advanced automated systems with rich, AI-based capabilities comply with safety standards strict action and cybersecurity of the automotive industry.

Nvidia recently received safety certifications and evaluations from accredited third parties, including:

● TÜV SÜD, which awarded Nvidia the ISO 21434 Cybersecurity Process certification for automated SoC, platform and software engineering processes. In addition, Nvidia DriveOS 6.0 is compliant with
Standards ISO 26262 Vehicle Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) D, pending certification release.
● TÜV Rheinland, which carried out the independent safety assessment of the European Economic Commission (UNECE) on Nvidia Drive AV related to the safety requirements for complex electronics
systems.

In addition, Nvidia is now accredited by the ANSI National Accreditation Board (ANAB) to provide safety and cybersecurity audits for Nvidia Drive ecosystem partners. The new Nvidia Drive AI Systems research lab will help the Nvidia Drive automotive ecosystem build autonomous driving software that meets the industry's growing safety and AI standards.

Nvidia is the first platform company to receive a comprehensive set of third-party evaluations for its automotive technologies – including Nvidia Drive's end-to-end self-driving platform, spanning SoC, OS , sensor architecture and level 2+ application software – as well as independent accreditation as a safety and cybersecurity research laboratory of AI systems for the automotive market.

Industry-leading computer-driven knowledge

Nvidia Drive Thor, the flagship for Drive Hyperion, follows the production-proven Nvidia Drive Orin. The compatibility and scalability architecture means that developers can use existing software from earlier DRIVE product generations, as well as integrate future updates, to achieve seamless development pipelines.

Drive Thor is based on the Nvidia Blackwell architecture and is optimized for the most demanding processing workloads, including those involving generative AI, vision language models and large language models. Its simplified architecture enhances generalization, reduces latency and enhances safety by using Nvidia's powerful accelerated computing to run the end-to-end AV stack and a proven safety stack at the same time.

Drive Thor paves the way for the next generation of AV technology, known as AV 2.0, which includes the delivery of autonomous human driving capabilities to navigate the most complex road conditions .

In addition to the Drive AGX in-vehicle computer, two other Nvidia computers form the basis of automotive-level AV development: Nvidia DGX systems for training advanced AI models and building a robust AV software stack in the cloud, and high- Nvidia Omniverse platform runs on Nvidia OVX systems for simulation and verification. These three computers, now powered by the Nvidia Cosmos global base model platform, are expected to accelerate end-to-end AV development and mass deployment.