Take a ride with us in a self-driving Audi Q7 using Nvidia autonomous tech

Nvidia had a strong showing overall at CES this year, but its most impressive demo had to be the self-driving vehicles it was showing off in a cordoned course built in a parking lot. The demo wasn't on city streets, as were others like the Delphi ride, but it was impressive in a different way; mostly because no human at all sat in the driver's seat of Nvidia's cars. Two cars were in rotation for Nvidia at its test track. The first is a Lincoln MKZ Nvidia purchased kitted with sensors ready for autonomous driving off the shelf from a third-party supplier that retrofits the vehicles specifically for this purpose, affectionately nicknamed'BB8.' BB8 has been in testing with Nvidia for some time now, and is the company's core vehicle for building out its neural network-based autonomous drive software. The second was an Audi Q7, newly equipped with Nvidia's DRIVE PX 2 in-car computer, which offers tremendous computing power in a very small package, and is suitable for handling the huge task of running a locally contained neural net that learns how to drive simply by observing the action of human drivers; these vehicles were trained in Vegas on only four days of driving, Nvidia's Senior Director of Automotive Danny Shapiro told me.