SANTA CLARA, CA—Outside of the visitor check-in on Nvidia's campus, three gorgeous cars—the Audi RS7, the Lamborghini Aventador, and the Tesla Model S—are parked, attracting the occasional gawking employee. Although Nvidia's partnership with the three car makers isn't anything new, we welcomed the chance to see just what the tech in these high-end cars is really like.

We also wanted to see what Nvidia hopes to offer car makers who are designing systems that will need to be cutting edge when their vehicles hit the market—a difficult task given the length of the automotive development cycle.

The car maker's challenge to stay ahead in tech is a topic that Ars is going to be revisiting over the next several months, so what better way to get our feet wet than to talk with the chip maker that has become synonymous with high-performance GPUs? Over the past five years, Nvidia has been making a big push into automotive technology, hoping to power not only the graphic information displays and entertainment systems that have become increasingly popular in cars, but also to get in on the ground floor of the self-driving systems of the future.

Currently, the chipmaker has partnerships with 14 car makers, from Volkswagen Group subsidiaries like Audi and Porsche, to BMW and Mini, to Peugeot and Tesla.

Connected in the driver’s seat

We hopped into the Audi RS7 first, taking a moment to go through the paces on the car's dashboard navigation and information display. The RS7 relies on Audi's Multi-Media Interface (MMI), in which the driver uses a control dial and a handful of side buttons to navigate through the display screen, rather than use a touch screen like many cars today do.

The RS7's system relies on a pre-Tegra automotive-grade processor to run Audi Connect, the company's proprietary companion software. This is hardly Nvidia's most powerful chip in the RS7, but the new Audi A3 does ship with Tegra 2 processors. The company hopes to sell more and more car makers on adopting its Visual Computing Module (VCM), which is a more powerful System on Chip (SoC) that's modular, so it can be easily upgraded to Nvidia's latest processor to keep up with increases in computing power. (Keep in mind, however, that this is designed for a car maker to keep ahead of the competition, not really for a customer to upgrade the processor in his or her car like one would upgrade an old CPU.)

In the car, Danny Shapiro, Nvidia's senior director of automotive, showed off the speed with which Audi Connect can call up cloud-stored information, particularly with respect to navigation. He pulled up directions to a restaurant and jazz club in Oakland called Yoshi's, and the display impressively rendered the map layout, responding to our dial turns as we zoomed in right up to street view.

Shapiro also noted that Audi contracts with numerous data aggregation companies to provide geographically aware information about the price of gas at refueling stations nearby, and even to show you whether there's still parking available in structures and lots in your area, and how much that parking costs. Suddenly, my decade-old Toyota Matrix started looking like a covered wagon.

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

I got in the driver's seat at that point and drove the RS7 down to the 101 freeway for a little test drive. I always find it a bit difficult to process new in-dash layouts the first couple of times I drive a car, so although I found it distracting, getting from Google Maps to, say, music controls was easier for me to navigate with the MMI layout than in cars with touch-screen displays or with displays whose buttons are right next to the screen. (In particular, I recently spent a weekend driving a rental Chevy Cruze, and I've been in Priuses with the side-button layout. Leaning forward and making sure your finger makes contact with the correct button or screen space is an incredible distraction, in my opinion.) In the RS7, there seemed to be little or no lag between my inputs through the MMI system to the display on the center console.

The car felt premium in every way when it came to add-on features, despite it running old hardware. In the driver's seat, I noticed that Audi Connect lists not only navigation instructions in the center console, but also the speed limit in the area, so there's no more hunting for a sign while keeping your eyes peeled for cops.

The car also comes equipped with a heads up display that projects your current speed as well as turn-by-turn navigation at the bottom of your windshield. Ars has played with these types of devices before and had mixed feelings, but the displayed instructions were bright and unobtrusive in my opinion.

I should mention, the RS7 I was sitting in had 3G connectivity, but Shapiro assured me that newer models will be shipping with 4G. Our car was connected via Verizon, and apparently Audi will give you a free data plan for six months when you buy the car; after that you have to fend for yourself.

The console also has a row of two SD card readers and one SIM card reader beneath the display so you can play media (like music playlists, or, when the car isn’t in motion, movies) off external memory.

I parked the Audi because it was time for the Lamborghini. When it comes to computing, the Aventador runs what is basically the same kind of hardware that's in the RS7; Lamborghini is owed by Audi AG, so the MMI dial layout is largely the same, and the display is powered by—you guessed it—Nvidia.

The Aventador also has an identical row of ports for two SD cards as the RS7 does, but these ports are placed down by the driver’s right leg. Hopefully you’ll plan rest stops accordingly so that you won’t need a passenger to change the cards too often.

To be honest, after driving around in the RS7 I took a couple of swipes at the Aventador's system and realized I had seen all this before. But then I realized I was riding in a half-million-dollar car and sort of forgot my feature-focused line of inquiry and just let myself feel the ride. Unfortunately, if you only have five minutes to drive down route 101 and back, many of the mysteries of the 700-horsepower engine will remain unrevealed to you. Alas.

While we were driving, a Lamborghini product specialist said that consumers of such a car are increasingly interested in the kind of computing power that their prospective vehicle runs, but he assured me that it's far from the first thing that a person thinking about buying an Aventador is looking for. That makes sense, as the sports car basically runs a previous-generation version of Audi Connect, without many of the bells and whistles that we experienced in the first test drive.

After a jaunt in that machine, Ars hopped in the Tesla Model S. We’ve already reviewed the Model S extensively, so there’s no need to go into it in too much detail, but we will note that the interior of the car eschews a center console for a giant 17" touch-screen display, which you can use to bring up driving directions, navigate the Web, and play music and radio. The display is capable of split-screen view, and certain functions (like turn-by-turn driving directions) can be called up and will appear both on the center display and the instrument cluster, which are powered by a Tegra 3 and Tegra 2 processor, respectively.

In our hands-on, the two processors talked to each other quickly, without much lag. Scrolling through Ars in full screen mode on the center display, however, did suffer from jerky scrolling and failed to register some touches.

Tesla’s Model S uses Nvidia’s VCM, so the electric car maker has the ability to upgrade the SoC on the module without changing the car’s design. Newer Model S’ may well contain more recent SoCs if Tesla so chooses.

On the road to compute power

Although the cars we tested were using older technology, Nvidia stressed that it was in the best position to provide all of a car’s graphics needs in the coming decade. The company has competition from the likes of Qualcomm and ARM, which are also developing power-sipping chips that can still do on-the-spot navigation, stream radio, post locations to Facebook, and could eventually detect other cars, and even people, in the car’s driving space.

Danny Shapiro and Alan Hall, Nvidia's Senior Communications Manager for Automotive, told Ars that the move for Nvidia into the automotive space was a natural one, as car developers have long used the company’s GPUs to design cars and to do fluid dynamic and aerodynamic modeling. Now Nvidia wants auto manufacturers to rely on it for all aspects of the business, from powering consoles in showrooms that allow prospective buyers to build customized cars, to allowing drivers to pick their own skin on digital instrument clusters above the steering wheel.

The company also talked up its Jetson Development Kit, which is currently shipping to a select group of developers, suppliers, and automakers. The kit was made to help car manufacturers go from prototype to product faster when it comes to in-car information systems, and the kit, like the VCMs that Nvidia is selling, has a modular design that allows for the VCM to be broken out and replaced as computing power evolves. This, Nvidia reasons, will allow cars that usually have a long development cycle to keep up with quickly improving hardware.

The Jetson Pro main board supports Linux and Android as well, and it comes with a touchscreen display and an optional digital instrument cluster display.

While this may not seem like much to the average consumer, who will likely never interact with an automotive development kit, Nvidia had two demonstrations of the types of programs that can be modeled for potential use in a car on such a kit.

In the first, a loop of video taken from a car on the highway was processed to show the speed and distance of other cars in the vicinity. Shapiro said that someday soon, a car will be able to process such visual information in real time and, say, beep an alert at the driver if they’re getting too close to a car, or if they're coming in too fast on a slowing car.

Nvidia's second demonstration showed a car that can detect when you’ve hit traffic. When it does so, it will go into a sort of “stop-and-go cruise control,” so the driver no longer has to be hitting the brake all the time. (As someone who grew up in Los Angeles and returns to that city frequently, I resisted the urge to shout "Shut up and take my money!")

Shapiro assured me that this feature only works in a single lane of traffic—it won’t move you over to the next lane if those cars appear to be speeding by (although that’s only ever an illusion anyway), nor can it be used to maneuver non-highway driving. But still, it’s easy to imagine that for all of the flashy press that Google’s self-driving cars have received, this is the way self-driving cars will become a reality: piece by piece, until consumers trust the machines enough to let them do most of the driving.

Which brings us to the more-distant future. In Nvidia’s showroom, the company had an Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) on display, which will in fact detect humans and other obstacles that pass in front of the car’s field of vision, using a constantly spinning laser sensor to assess the surrounding area. Such a system would naturally take an awful lot of computing power, and the as-yet-unreleased Tegra K1 SoC is the cutting edge system that the company says will be able to navigate such a car autonomously.

Announced this January at CES, the 64-bit Tegra K1 will have 192 CUDA cores and should have computing power comparable to Nvidia’s GeForce GT 630 or 635 dedicated GPUs.

Although a car with Tegra K1 in it is a long way off, it's nice to dream, and if the present informs the future, I'm looking forward to buying a "gently used," decade-old, self-driving car with 100,000 miles on it in a decade or two (or three). You have to have dreams, after all.