When Karma introduced their E-Flex platform last month, the company revealed they were also working on autonomous delivery vans.
Fast forward to today and the automaker has taken the wraps off an electric van with Level 4 semi-autonomous driving technology.
The company didn’t say much about the vehicle, but should be pretty familiar as it wears the body of a Fiat Ducato. Despite this, Karma says the model rides on their E-Flex platform which can be configured in up to 22 different ways.
Karma says the van is highly flexible and can incorporate flat or I-shaped battery packs. The model can also accommodate multiple powertrains including dual- and quad motor setups as well as a range-extended variant with between one and four motors. The van is also capable of supporting bi-directional charging which is an added bonus.
While the automaker was coy about the specifics, the van features an autonomous driving system from WeRide. It uses assortment of Lidar and radar sensors as well as a camera and GPS. Karma says this gives the van a 360° view of its surroundings in real-time.
All of this information is fed into a NVIDIA Drive AGX Pegasus computing platform which has two Xavier processors and two Tensor Core GPUs. Karma says this allows for “an unprecedented 320 trillion operations per second of deep learning” as well as “safe, highly automated and fully autonomous driving.”
While a lot of questions remain, Karma’s vice president of autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems said “By working with nimble technology leaders like WeRide and NVIDIA, we intend to offer unique market solutions with greater speed and efficiency.”
