As the autonomous vehicle industry enters the next year, it will start navigating into even greater technology frontiers. Next-generation vehicles won’t just be defined by autonomous driving capabilities. Everything from the design and production process to the in-vehicle experience is entering a new era of digitization, efficiency, safety, and intelligence.

These trends arrive after a wave of breakthroughs in 2022. More automakers announced plans to build software-defined vehicles on the NVIDIA DRIVE Orin system-on-a-chip — including Jaguar Land Rover, NIO, Polestar, Volvo, and Xpeng. And in-vehicle computing pushed the envelope with the next-generation NVIDIA DRIVE Thor platform. Delivering up to 2,000 trillion floating operations per second, DRIVE Thor unifies autonomous driving and cockpit functions on a single computer for unprecedented speed and efficiency.

In the coming year, the industry will see even more wide-ranging innovations begin to take hold, as industrial metaverse and cloud technologies become more prevalent. Simulation technology for AV development has also flourished in the past year. New tools and techniques on NVIDIA DRIVE Sim, including using AI tools for training and validation, have narrowed the gap between the virtual and real worlds.