However, increased demand for high quality digital displays inside cars – including dashboard navigation systems, virtual instrument clusters and rear-seat entertainment systems – has pushed automakers to look beyond their traditional suppliers to obtain a technological edge.  The Tesla Model S, for example, features a 17-inch touchscreen display in the middle of the dashboard, which replaces almost every physical button in the car. It can be used to control everything from the air conditioning to the suspension settings and even the sunroof.  Meanwhile, the Mercedes F015 concept car envisages the interior of the car as a “digital living space,” allowing passengers to interact intuitively with the connected vehicle by means of gestures and high-resolution touchscreens, and the Audi Prologue turns the car’s entire instrument panel and dashboard into single touchscreen display.  Mr Shapiro said that Nvidia’s ambition is to make what is displayed on the screen better match the physical world inside the vehicle. The Tegra X1 processor, which powers its Drive CX cockpit visualisation computer, is capable of delivering one trillion floating-point operations per second (flops) – the same amount of power as a 1,600 square foot supercomputer 15 years ago.  This means it can render physical materials such as carbon fibre, brushed metals and glass in a photorealistic manner. It can also render 3D maps and landmarks with advanced lighting effects, and provide detailed surround vision to help with parking and manoeuvring.  “When the design team see this they start drooling, because the instrument cluster is like the jewel in the crown, and when it becomes a bland two-dimensional thing with simple circles for dials, it doesn’t really reflect the experience of driving that car,” he said. “So we’re seeing a lot of craftsmanship, adding shadows and lighting, and it can change according to the preferences of the driver or the mode that the car is in.”  Nvidia is still a niche player in the automotive chip business. Larger companies like Texas Instruments, Intel and Qualcomm currently dominate the market, and automotive sales represented just 4pc of Nvidia's $4.7bn annual revenue in its most recent fiscal year.  However, Mr Shapiro claims that there has been an evolution in the thinking of car makers, in terms of the electronics that are required for today’s systems. The company expects automotive revenue of $183 million this year, and has booked more than $2 billion in future automotive business.  But Nvidia’s real ambition is to conquer the driverless cars market. To this end, the company recently launched the Drive PX autopilot computer, which takes in data from up to 12 cameras positioned around the car, and combines it with extensive “deep learning” to teach the car to sense and interpret what is taking place around it .  “We’re able to feed the system information so it can learn much like a child learns by identifying things in a scene in advance. Then it can go back and understand, and we can teach it to recognise all different types of road signs, different lanes, different cars, different people, and that’s really what’s going to enable the self-driving car of the future,” said Mr Shapiro.  “So we train it in the data centre, and we load the model into the car, and it can process it in real time. And if there’s something it doesn’t understand, it’ll send it back to the cloud and it will be part of the next training set, so the car will continue getting smarter and smarter.”  The company has worked with Audi on its zFAS self-driving car technology, which was demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2015, when an Audi A7 driverless car concept drove itself over 550 miles from San Francisco to the event in Las Vegas.  Audi A7 driverless car concept  Of course, the evolution of driverless cars has not been without its setbacks. Only this week, Google admitted that 11 of its self-driving vehicles have been involved in "minor accidents" over the past six years.  However, Chris Urmson, director of Google's self-driving car programme, insists that the company's vehicles were never the cause of the accidents. It is generally thought that driverless cars will reduce the number accidents caused by human error. Tesla’s founder Elon Musk has even suggested it may someday be illegal for people to drive, because it is too dangerous.  Mr Shapiro said that automakers are likely to take a staged approach to olling out driverless features in cars. While taking your hands off the steering wheel and feet off the pedals on the motorway is well within the capabilities of existing technology, allowing your car to navigate itself through a busy city centre is a different matter.  Many associate this kind of high-tech gadgetry with luxury cars, but Nvidia's systems are already being installed in some entry-level cars, like the Audi A3 in the US. Mr Shapiro pointed out that airbags were once considered luxury items, and are now standard safety features in most cars.  “People like to drive cars. They don’t like to necessarily park their cars, they don’t like to sit in traffic, so there are these computer-aided driving modes where, if you don’t want to drive, you let the car take over, but when you want to drive, you drive,” said Mr Shapiro.  "I think once we start to see these systems dramatically reduce accidents, injuries, fatalities, there’s no reason why they won't become mandatory."
The chips inside driverless cars will be as powerful as those used in some   supercomputers, according to Danny Shapiro, senior director of automotive at   Nvidia