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.”
