Aftermarket November 2022

16 AFTERMARKET NOVEMBER 2022 TECHNICAL/AFTERMARKET OF THE FUTURE www.aftermarketonline.net The Great Self-Driving Exploration in Taunton The good people of Taunton, Somerset, were treated to rides in Aurrigo’s self-driving Auto-Pod and Auto-Shuttle as The Great Self- Driving Exploration continued in September. Run by the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV), and research specialist BritainThinks, a similar trial took place at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland in June. Lucy Bush, Research Director at BritainThinks, explained: “It offers an opportunity to understand what people think of self-driving vehicles as they are now, and also their hopes and expectations for the future.” Three different vehicles were supplied by Coventry-based Aurrigo; The four-seater Auto-Pod, designed for non-road passenger transportation; The ten-seater Auto-Shuttle, the first road legal vehicle to be manufactured by the Group; Amdthe one-off prototype Auto-Deliver, designed for home deliveries. At Taunton, the Auto-Pod operated at the picturesque Vivary Park, close to the town centre, while the Auto-Shuttle ran at Somerset County Cricket Club, where the Auto-Deliver was also on display. At Alnwick, the Auto- Shuttle took passengers from the bus station up to the castle, a 1.2km route shared with cars, bikes and pedestrians, while the Auto-Pod carried passengers on a shared 500m path between the castle and Alnwick Gardens. www.aftermarketonline.net In September, Nvidia unveiled a new computing platform, Drive Thor, designed to centralise self-driving and assisted driving, along with other digital functions such as in-car entertainment. Succeeding the successful Drive Orin, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang describes Thor as “a superchip of epic proportions… an incredible leap in deep neural network accuracy.” The system-on-a-chip (SoC) is built on the latest central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) advances, delivering 2,000 teraflops of performance. “Drive Thor unifies traditionally distributed functions in vehicles, including digital cluster, infotainment, parking and assisted driving, for greater efficiency in development and faster software iteration,” said Jensen. “Manufacturers can configure the Drive Thor superchip in multiple ways. They can dedicate all of the platform’s 2,000 teraflops to the autonomous driving pipeline, or use a portion for in-cabin AI and infotainment.” Nvidia says the SoC is capable of multi-domain computing, enabling a car to run Linux, QNX and Android simultaneously on one computer. Realistically, it could be fitted into carmakers’ 2025 models. Danny Shapiro, head of Nvidia's automotive business, told Reuters: "You can imagine tremendous savings in terms of cost, in terms of reduced cabling, in terms of reduced weight, in terms of reduced energy consumption overall.” www.aftermarketonline.net Thor: Teraflop! Neil Kennett looks at cutting-edge auto tech coming to a workshop near you soon AFTERMARKET OF THE FUTURE A commentator on the UK aftermarket since before Concorde was grounded, Neil is Editor of Carsofthefuture .co.uk , providing news and views about driverless vehicles, and Director of Communications at Self- drivingpr.com, experts in automotive/autonomous media and public relations