A grain of truth from Las Vegas

truth from Las Vegas

A grain of truth from Las Vegas

And how enormous green monsters announced the future of autonomous driving some years ago.   

Self-driving vehicles aren’t new, and Tesla wasn’t the first to offer them.

Agriculture has had them for years.

Yes, farming. Not Silicon Valley.

John Deere, the famous green symbol of American rural life, implemented precision self-driving some 20 years before Tesla announced its Autopilot.

John Deere started using satellite technology in the 1990s to achieve precision agriculture, combining GPS location data with sensors on its harvesters to show farmers where their paddocks were giving them stronger and weaker grain yields.

It led the company to later work with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to automate its tractors.

Today, once a paddock is mapped, an enormous 26-tonne John Deere X9 1100 grain harvester with a 15-metre-wide cutterbar at the front can autonomously cross-cross a paddock on Australia’s vast 7.7-million square-kilometre landscape with a repeatable accuracy of one inch (25.4 mm). Not bad.

All of this adds perspective to this year’s CES consumer electronics show in Las Vegas, where Deere showcased its latest equipment automation plans using advanced stereo cameras and Lidar systems.

Every year, major automakers unveil and promise technology-rich future plans at this glitzy show, but 2025 was a bit different with a more subdued mood being reported.

Instead, it was big-scale chip maker Nvidia, not a carmaker, grabbing the headlines. The company’s CEO reportedly said AVs (autonomous vehicles) will be the first trillion-dollar robotics industry, adding, “we’re working with just about every major car company around the world” in the deployment of Nvidia computing and AI.

Wow.

Nvidia also unveiled its new platform, Nvidia Cosmos, which can predict and generate massive amounts of photoreal, physics-based synthetic data to help the development of AVs.

The implications of this are huge.

It means computer-generated driving scenarios of every possible kind could train a vehicle how to behave when it’s not being operated by a human.

This might seem fanciful at first glance, but there is one inescapable fact:

It’s obvious global automakers and their suppliers are now being guided by technology behemoths like Nvidia.

This is a big deal. In the same way faster microchips guided the rapid development of PCs and smartphones, this all points to swathes of future new-car models being driven (so to speak) by the speed at which computing and AI datasets can grow.

It also means everyday cars could end up offering features and services not even the Jetsons’ illustrators could dream up.

But one thing is certain, and John Deere certainly knows it:

The future looks green.

Bernie Quinn, CEO of Premcar

 

About Premcar:

Premcar Pty Ltd is a leading Australian vehicle engineering business that specialises in the automotive, defence and aerospace industries. For more than 25 years, global car-makers have made Premcar their go-to partner for the complete design, engineering and manufacture of niche-model new cars, full-scale new-vehicle development programs, and electric vehicle (EV) conversions and manufacturing. Premcar’s body of work is extensive. It is the name behind more than 200,000 new cars and 55,000 new-vehicle engines. The company has delivered technical advancements and sales success for major car brands from Europe, the USA, Japan, China and Australia. Visit premcar.au.

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