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First Nvidia AI-powered Mercedes self-driving car to hit roads in Q1

Published: 06 Jan. 2026, 14:43 Updated: 06 Jan. 2026, 16:38

SARAH CHEA
[email protected]

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang introduces the Alpamayo AI model, which will be applied in the newest Mercedes-Benz CLA, during his speech at CES 2026 in Las Vegas on Jan. 6. [JOINT PRESS CORPS]

LAS VEGAS — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivered a surprise during his keynote address at CES 2026, announcing that the company's first AI-driven autonomous vehicle, which was developed alongside Mercedes-Benz, will hit the roads in the first quarter of this year.

According to Huang, Nvidia has completed development on Alpamayo — a family of open-source AI models that serves as the world's first “thinking and reasoning” autonomous vehicle AI — which will be featured in the upcoming Mercedes-Benz CLA.

“Alpamayo is trained end to end, literally from camera in and actuation out,” Huang said during his speech in Las Vegas on Jan. 5. “It reasons about the action it is about to take, the reasoning behind that action and the trajectory.”

Huang then presented a video depicting a driving demonstration of the autonomous Mercedes CLA. During the five-year development journey, Mercedes was responsible for creating the vehicle’s hardware, including the exterior design and interior systems, and Nvidia provided the fully autonomous driving software stack.

The model is slated to be released in the United States in the first quarter of 2026, in Europe in the second quarter and in Asia in the third and fourth quarters.

Alpamayo will also introduce vision-language-action, or VLA, models, enabling self-driving systems to interpret visual inputs, reason through complex driving situations and perform precise driving maneuvers. The platform will additionally include large reasoning models, simulation tools for testing rare or dangerous scenarios and open datasets to train the AI program and validate information.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang presents the Rubin GPU during his presentation for CES 2026 in Las Vegas on Jan. 5. [JOINT PRESS CORPS]

Nvidia said the Alpamayo “enhances transparency, safety and robustness in autonomous systems, particularly in complex, real-world environments, and supports progress toward higher levels of vehicle autonomy.”

“We build the entire stack, but the entire stack is open for the ecosystem,” Huang said. “The ecosystem working with us to build Level 4 autonomy and robotaxi services is expanding, and it’s going everywhere.”

“We imagine that, someday, a billion cars on the road will all be autonomous,” he added. “You could either have it be a robotaxi that you’re orchestrating and renting from somebody, or you could own it.”

Meanwhile, when Hyundai Motor Group was asked whether it would apply Nvidia’s Alpamayo to its own autonomous vehicle development, Hyundai Motor Group Vice Chairman Chang Jae-hoon did not make any direct comments but said that Hyundai would discuss any future collaborations at a later date.

Hyundai previously announced late last year that it would source 50,000 of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, which will be used across its autonomous driving and robotics businesses.

“What matters is not just developing a single robot or autonomous system, but how much further we can go,” Chang said. “We aim to combine innovation across our manufacturing operations via a fully built robotics ecosystem, grounded in Hyundai Motor Group’s strengths in safety, quality and reliability. Once partnerships are finalized, we will disclose and discuss them.”

On Monday, Nvidia also announced that its next-generation AI chip, Vera Rubin, has entered mass production. The company said the chip is scheduled for an official release in the second half of this year.

BY SARAH CHEA [[email protected]]