New Delhi, Jan. 6 -- Autonomous driving has never struggled with the obvious. Highway cruising, lane keeping, and predictable traffic flows are largely solved problems. What continues to stall large-scale Level 4 deployment are the rare, messy moments - the pedestrian who hesitates, the delivery truck blocking half a lane, or the unexpected behaviour that falls outside neatly labelled datasets.

At CES 2026, NVIDIA placed that uncomfortable reality at the centre of its autonomous vehicle strategy.

The company unveiled Alpamayo, a new family of open-source AI models, simulation tools, and datasets designed to help autonomous systems reason through these long-tail driving scenarios, not just recognise them. The move signals a broader shift...