Nvidia unveils self-driving platform on new Mercedes release
By Josh White
Date: Tuesday 06 Jan 2026
(Sharecast News) - Nvidia unveiled a new artificial intelligence platform aimed at advancing fully autonomous driving overnight on Tuesday, as the company deepened its push beyond chipmaking into what it calls "physical AI", according to a report from the BBC.
Speaking at the CES technology conference in Las Vegas, chief executive Jensen Huang introduced Alpamayo, an open-source AI model designed to help self-driving cars reason through complex and rare driving scenarios and explain their decisions in real time.
Huang said the technology enables vehicles to learn directly from human driving behaviour, allowing them to operate more naturally while maintaining transparency over how decisions are made.
Huang also revealed that Nvidia had started producing a driverless version of the Mercedes-Benz CLA using its technology, in partnership with the German carmaker.
The vehicle was expected to launch in the United States in the coming months before being rolled out in Europe and Asia.
A video demonstration shown at the event featured the car navigating San Francisco streets while a passenger sat behind the wheel with their hands off the controls.
Nvidia shares edged higher in after-hours trading following the presentation.
Alpamayo was being released as an open-source model on machine learning platform Hugging Face, allowing researchers to access and retrain it for free.
Huang said Nvidia's ambition was for autonomous technology to become universal across cars and trucks, while also confirming plans to launch a robotaxi service next year with an unnamed partner.
The development placed Nvidia more directly in competition with companies such as Tesla, whose chief executive Elon Musk said on social media that solving the final edge cases in autonomous driving remained extremely difficult.
Nvidia, now the world's most valuable publicly traded company, also used the event to confirm that its next-generation Rubin AI chips were in production and due for release later this year, promising improved energy efficiency and lower development costs, the BBC reported.
Reporting by Josh White for Sharecast.com.
Email this article to a friend
or share it with one of these popular networks:
You are here: news
10 Lower Thames St,
London EC3R 6EN