I rode along in Nvidia’s AV pilot. It made better decisions than me

The Nvidia–Mercedes pilot handled San Francisco streets with zero drama, underscoring a bigger bet: autonomy as a scalable stack, not a robotaxi business

Image via Shannon Carroll

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s a gorgeous California day in the Bay Area, one where the city is doing its most flattering impression of itself — cold sun, hard shadows, and that particular Friday energy where everyone’s late and somehow still stopping for a matcha. I’m in the passenger seat of a brand new Mercedes-Benz CLA sedan zipping around the crowded, two-lane streets of the city when an everyday urban traffic trap unfolds: A delivery van in front of me has stopped to unload, there’s a bus coming quickly in the other direction, and pedestrians are darting across the street as if crosswalks are just a suggestion. The driver, Lucas, doesn’t have his hands on the wheel as the car glides forward. And I have exactly zero worries about how things will play out — because I’m inside Nvidia’s autonomous vehicle pilot, and this car makes better decisions than I can. 

It has to. It’s trained to.

The car starts by using its 10 cameras, five radar sensors, and 12 ultrasonic sensors to read the obvious tell: hazard lights. It doesn’t immediately commit to swinging around the van, though. It verifies that the vehicle is truly stopped, gauges the bus’ speed and distance, waits out the pedestrian flow, and then nudges left with the smoothness of someone who has done this a thousand times before — but without the energy of someone who has done this a thousand times before. (The best self-driving flex is “no drama.”)

“That was pretty well-handled,” Ali Kani, Nvidia’s VP of the automotive team, tells me from the backseat. 

He’s not wrong.

For almost an hour, the car — using Nvidia’s driver-assist system — confidently handles everything the road throws at it under driver supervision: from the Ferry Building, down the Embarcadero, up the hills of Fillmore Street, and onto Union Street, where the shops are adorable and the........

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