Jaguar Land Rover accelerates self-driving hub plans

Carmaker Jaguar is opening up three new engineering hubs in Europe to develop autonomous vehicle technologies as part of its ongoing partnership with computer processing giant Nvidia.

Reuters reports that the hubs will be located in Munich, Bologna and Madrid and were selected on the basis of local availability of digital engineering specialists.

It is claimed that the hubs will create almost 100 engineering jobs focused “on developing driver assistance systems and artificial intelligence for self-driving cars of the future”.

The three new hubs add to the existing six which car maker has in the US, China and Europe.

Parent company JLR’s announcement comes a year after it signed a multiyear agreement with Nvidia which sees software experts from both companies working jointly to develop AI-powered autonomous driving and connected services for all vehicles built on the software defined Nvidia Drive platform.

The firms claims that the platform will deliver a wide spectrum of active safety, automated driving and parking systems as well as assisted drive functions.

Inside the vehicle, it promises the system will deliver AI features such as driver and occupant monitoring and ‘advanced visualisation’ of the vehicle’s environment.

JLR said that it would also leverage in-house developed data centre solutions with Nvidia for training AI models and Drive Sim software built on Nvidia’s Omniverse for real-time physically accurate simulation.

The auto firm said that the tech would appear in its luxury cars launching 2025 “and beyond”.

But while the UK is already planning changes to accommodate autonomous vehicles, experts have predicted that it may be a decade before fully self-driving (level 4) cars hit the roads.