March 18, 2026 | NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang says AV tech is 'solved'; Nissan's last laugh

Welcome to Daily Drive.

For Thursday, March 18, 2026, I'm Kellan Walker in Las Vegas.

Today on the show, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang says he's convinced self-driving tech is

already a solved problem.

Gas prices spike, and used EV dealers in some markets are suddenly swamped.

An out East Q9 SUV launches in America first a historic shift for the German brand, plus

automotive news Asia editor Hans Grimel says Nissan may have dodged a bullet with its failed

merger last year with Honda.

Nissan has a new CEO that did make the hard decisions, is putting Nissan through a kind

of a tough love revival plan.

Then meanwhile, Honda has kind of gone its own separate way.

Let's run through all the news you need to know to keep up in the auto industry.

Gasoline prices have jumped 27% in the US since the Iran conflict began, and it's starting

to change the global car market.

Used EV dealers in Europe are seeing something they've never seen before, showrooms packed

with anxious buyers.

In Germany, EV related web traffic is up 40%.

Here in the US, not so much.

CarGuru says EV searches have barely budged.

Turns out, according to Cox Automotive, most American buyers won't seriously think about

going electric until gas hits $6 a gallon.

Meanwhile, the list of canceled EVs continues to grow.

Volvo is dropping its compact EX30 electric crossover in the US, and it's not because

the car was bad.

One dealer told Automotive News the EX30 came out, quote, pretty bulletproof.

But it only sold about 5,400 units last year, less than 5% of Volvo's total volume.

The culprits, import tariffs, the loss of federal EV tax credits, and a market that's

just not ready for compact electric vehicles at the price of Volvo needed to charge.

The EX30 will stick around in Canada and Mexico, but US production wraps up this summer.

And Audi's trying something new.

And American dealers are getting first dibs.

Audi's largest crossover ever, the Q9, will launch in the US before anywhere else.

That's a first for the German luxury brand.

CEO Gernot Doehner says they listened to what American customers wanted this time.

A spacious interior with six captain's chairs that works as a chauffeured vehicle.

The timing's strategic.

The Q9 arrives later this year, just as Audi phases out the A8 sedan.

It's also a lifeline for dealers watching sales drop 16% last year.

And those are today's headlines.

You can find more details on all those stories at AutoNews.com.

Automotive news tech and innovation reporter Molly Boygon is at NVIDIA GTC 2026 in San Jose

this week.

That's where she got a chance to speak with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang about the company's

automotive business.

Right now, automotive represents just 1% of NVIDIA's revenue.

But Huang says he's perfectly fine with that because he believes autonomous driving is already

a solved problem.

Here's that exchange.

This is Molly Boygon from Automotive News.

Thanks for taking my question.

NVIDIA's automotive business is about a percent of the company's total revenue.

What challenge do you think is most important in determining if and when automotive becomes

material to NVIDIA's financial results?

Yeah, thanks.

I appreciate that.

And that question is particularly dear to me because as you know, NVIDIA's crew

the business used to be 0% of our business.

And it was 90% of our cost.

And any sane person would have given up on that.

But none of you would be in this room right now.

And so when we first introduced the program in her shader in 20, 25 years ago,

nobody knew how to use it.

Nobody wanted to pay for it.

No benchmarking site thought it was a good idea.

If we were to give it up on that program, the shading wouldn't have been cheapest.

Eight years ago when I announced RTS ray tracing, everybody who did.

Everybody said ray tracing, full bar.

If we didn't have RTS today, doing full scene path tracing, computer graphics would be what

it is today.

So it turns out almost everything that we did in the beginning cost a lot of money

and it generated nothing.

And even a lot of bad will.

And so you have to believe in what you believe in.

And you know, decide whether you want to pursue it or not.

10 years ago, I started to work on autonomous vehicles.

The team was one person, me and this other one person.

And we started that journey to understand what are the, what are the technical problems that

we're trying to construct and we now have a few thousand people working on our ABT.

You say that it's 1%.

However, remember, and being as tons vehicle business includes three computers.

There's the training system, the synthetic data generation and simulation system,

the automobile systems and the AV system.

The AV system is the only part that we say is part of the autonomous vehicle business directly.

But the fact of the matter is because we focused in this area, the total business is

much larger than people think.

Remember, Tesla buys a media system for training and say, does it weigh?

So does walking.

So does, you know, every single autonomous vehicle company in the world who's working

in AD of any kind trucks, vans, cars, robot taxi, they're buying one of these three computers

or all of these three computers from us.

And so that it's quite long.

It's quite long.

But it doesn't change the fact that even if it was zero, I would continue to pursue it.

Now, it leads me to why am I so convinced this is going to happen?

Because I could fully believe the times vehicle is a solved problem.

It took us 10 years to get here.

It's definitely a solved problem.

The rest of this is engineering requirement.

In 10 years, someday one trillion miles per day will be 100% or largely autonomous.

One trillion miles per day just today.

It's only limited because driving is limited by butts on seats.

If we were not limited by butts on seats, the number of autonomous, the number of miles

driven in the world will definitely go up.

And let's say it's two trillion miles a day, a year.

Pick your favorite number for dollars per mile.

It is a multi trillion dollar business.

And so most multi trillion dollar businesses started at zero at some point.

It's a perfectly fine being zero.

I still believe what I believe.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang spoke with our own Molly Boygon at NVIDIA GTC in San Jose.

During another part of the roundtable,

Huang gave a shout out to Automotive News' Centennial Coffee Table Book.

There's actually a chapter of being in that book.

I just want to tell you how fine I am in the automotive industry.

The handing forward that was in there, I admit.

You can read all of our coverage from NVIDIA GTC at AutoNews.com.

Coming up, a look at why Nissan may have gotten the last laugh in its failed merger with Honda.

That's next on Daily Drive.

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This isn't just an award.

It's a chance to get real insight into what's working at your dealership

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And we've expanded the categories this year,

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The registration deadline is April 17th.

Find out more and apply at AutoNews.com.

Welcome back to Daily Drive.

I'm Kellan Walker.

When Honda and Nissan's merger talks collapsed last year,

Honda's CEO publicly lectured Nissan about moving too slow

and not making bold enough decisions.

Fast forward to today and the tables have turned.

Honda just posted its first net loss in corporate history

after canceling multiple EV models.

Meanwhile, Nissan under new CEO Yvonne Espinoza

is cutting costs aggressively and starting to stabilize.

Automotive news Asia editor Hans Grimel has a column on AutoNews.com

arguing that Nissan dodged the bullet and may have gotten the last laugh after all.

Our own Jake Nier reached Hans at his home office in Tokyo.

Hans, always great to have you here on Daily Drive.

Thanks for joining us.

Thank you, Jake.

Good to be here.

Really fascinating column here and, you know, in retrospect,

there's a lot to learn, I think, from what happened with this.

First, set the scene for us, Hans.

At one point, Honda was essentially lecturing Nissan

about needing to be more quick and decisive.

Walk us through this dramatic reversal.

Like, how did we get here?

Well, if we go back to December of 2024,

there was a big surprise announcement that all of a sudden,

Nissan and Honda were going to have a merger,

not just a cooperation which they had been working on before,

cooperating on projects here and there, but actually have a full-on merger,

and they were going to be merging, combining their companies,

and kind of a quasi merger of equals this year, 2026.

That was the timeline.

And as we lapsed then into 2025,

they were supposed to hammer out the details and make arrangements

about where they were going to integrate

and how they were going to create a committee to move ahead

and then maybe even bring in Mitsubishi

to join into a three-way tie-up that would have created

the world's number three auto group at the time,

and with volume over eight million vehicles a year.

So it was quite a substantial merger that they were envisioning.

Then, as they got into early 2025,

it seemed like Honda was getting some cold feet.

They didn't see, they looked under the hood at Nissan,

saw that Nissan was really struggling with a lot of problems.

This was under former Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida,

and they were struggling with losses with a bad balance sheet,

cash flow problems, and of course, sliding sales,

and Honda thought, well, you know what, we're quite stronger than that.

If we're going to actually tie up with you,

we want to do it our way.

We want to have full control and a full merger,

make Nissan essentially a division of Honda Motor Company,

and that created a lot of friction, which ultimately tore apart

the whole plans for a merger.

So they blew up the plans for the merger,

and at that point, Honda CEO, Mibe-san,

was basically lecturing the counterparts over at Nissan,

saying you're moving too slow, you're not being bold enough,

you're not making the hard decisions that you really need to make

to turn your company around,

and Nissan said, no, thank you, we're not in for a merger,

and they went their separate ways.

Shortly thereafter, Nissan has a new CEO that did make the hard decisions,

is putting Nissan through a kind of a tough love revival plan,

then meanwhile, Honda has kind of gone its own separate way.

It's been a victim of kind of an over ambition,

or over optimism in the EV trend,

which of course has since gone kind of flip-flopped on them

because of the loss of incentives,

and now it's Honda that's in the world of hurt,

just as Nissan seems to be finding its feet.

So it's a little bit of a reversal of fortunes there,

now it's Nissan that's on the upswing,

or at least as bottomed out,

and it's Honda that seems to be in free fall.

And as we've been talking about on the show,

Honda recently cancelling three EV models,

and then it looks like the prologue is also going to end after this run.

In hindsight, were there warning signs,

do you think that Honda's all-in approach was too aggressive on EVs,

and why did Honda's competitors hedge their bets instead?

Well, I think there were a couple maybe warning signs.

Honda was unique among the Japanese automakers

in going all-in on EVs basically.

I shouldn't say it wasn't like flipping a switch

and switching to EVs tomorrow,

but it was the only Japanese automaker

that fully committed to phasing out internal combustion by 2040.

So it was rather a radical fast timeline for that,

and that's a big change for a company

that is one of the world's biggest makers of internal combustion engines,

because you have to remember,

it not only has an automotive division,

but it's one of the world's biggest makers of motorcycles,

and it also has a huge power plant maker

that makes things like lawmakers and generators

and all kinds of little self-contained combustion engines.

So that would have been a major revolution, I suppose,

for Honda to remake itself in that image.

And I think that was maybe a little bit too drastic

for a company of its size, of its medium size,

of its limited resources.

The rest of the Japanese companies

took a more measured approach,

partly because they knew that their home market of Japan

was very slow in going to EVs.

So I think maybe one of the warning signs

that we could have seen early on was that

Honda was losing sight of its home market,

which is very slow to adapt to these EVs,

and it didn't have that support of the home market base behind it.

Let's talk a little bit about the leadership

of both of these companies.

As you mentioned, Nissan has a new CEO.

We'll talk about Yvonne Espinosa in a second.

But when it comes to Mibe,

he says he is forfeiting 30% of his pay at Honda

for three months over this.

You noted it's up to investors in the board

to decide if that's a sufficient response,

or recompense, I guess you could say.

But based on what you're hearing in Japan,

is there appetite for bigger leadership changes at Honda?

Well, that's a good question.

I hear from analysts in the investor community here

and people from the outside looking in that

they're not happy with the direction

that Mibe has led the company first.

His over-aggression in dealing with Nissan

kind of blew up that deal.

Now he's led Honda into its first net loss

in his corporate history,

writing down billions and billions of dollars

of wasted money on this bad bet on EVs.

So it's clear that he kind of overstepped his bounds

and led Honda into a pitfall here.

That said, he's still on the agenda

for this year's shareholder meeting

to be re-elected as the president this year in June

at the annual shareholding meeting.

So we've got that going for him.

But you never know, he's been in office

for five years or so.

And that's about the normal turnover period

for a CEO in Japan five, six years.

So he could be coming up for a rotation.

Well, let's talk about Ivan Espinosa, as I mentioned.

He's been CEO at Nissan for less than a year now.

But in that time, you mentioned that he's got

a pretty bold turnaround plan here.

And in just in a few months,

he's announced exits from seven plants, 20,000 job cuts,

half a trillion yen in cost reductions.

What's your assessment at this point

of whether this turnaround plan is looking

like it's on track, whether it has legs,

or is this just sort of basic crisis management?

Well, he's doing a good job in terms of cutting the costs,

in terms of right sizing the company, as they say it.

He's really slashing the global production footprint,

bringing the costs in line with its capacity, basically.

So that is a must do.

The biggest challenge he'll have is after all this cuts

is trying to get the sales going in the right direction

because sales are still falling, and he needs new product,

attractive new product to kind of turn that around.

If he can't get the revenue going and sales going

in the upward direction again,

then all the cutting in the world

is not going to help him right to the ship.

And that's the biggest challenge that he faces going ahead.

So going back to the original conceit that really Nissan

kind of has the last laugh here,

even after being lectured by Honda and so forth,

do you think that Honda could have avoided some of its troubles

if it had not sort of blown up these talks with Nissan?

Do you think that a merger may have benefited Honda

in some way more than it realized at the time?

Well, it's hard to see what the future of these companies

could have been if they had they emerged.

I tend to see that the merger of the two companies

would have just compounded their own headaches, maybe.

It's not clear that putting two weak companies together

would have created a strong company,

rather than just compounded their own problems.

It's probably better that each of them

sorts through their own headaches and their own weaknesses first,

put themselves on the track,

and then seeks out partners again from a position of strength.

That's at least Nissan's point of view under Espinoza.

He is open to having other partners

and still on the track for creating these partnerships going forward,

knowing that he doesn't have the capacity alone in Nissan

to compete in this new world that we're in.

But he also says that Nissan has to fix its own problems

to pretty itself up in order to find a good partner

from a position of strength.

So that, I think, is the prudent approach here

that Nissan is trying to take.

With that in mind, when this story was the daily talker about a year ago,

it felt like there were a lot of conversations

about broader industry consolidation.

That's a topic that had a lot of steam for a while,

and now it seems like we're not talking so much about it.

Is there a lesson to learn about that idea

that the industry can consolidate

and in order to better compete with China

and do better with technology, things like that?

What should we take out of this microcosm about the broader issue?

Well, that's a good observation,

because for a long time, scale was the key to success, right?

And we saw companies combining and mergers as the kind of the panacea, right?

That Stellantis is the classic example of that,

where you just bolt a bunch of companies together,

build a huge constellation.

Literally, the Stellantis was the idea there,

that it's a constellation of stars of all these different brands.

But in reality, it became much more complicated.

It adds a lot of complication to management,

to brand management, to technology management,

and realizing the true benefits of that kind of economy of scale

is much more difficult than you might think it would be.

At the same time, I think the new realization in the industry

is that instead of combining automakers,

it might make better sense to combine an automaker

with some tech company from outside of the field

to bring in some kind of expertise

that the automaker doesn't have itself,

to kind of leapfrog ahead in terms of technology,

if not in terms of scale.

So instead of combining a Nissan with a Honda,

combine a Nissan with a tech company.

It could be an AI company, it could be an autonomous driving company,

it could be a chip making company,

it could be a collection of different companies in different fields.

But the idea is to spread outside of the auto industry

and bring in expertise to leapfrog ahead that way.

Really fascinating column.

It's called Enfailed Nissan Honda Merger.

Nissan has the last laugh written by my colleague, Hans Grimel.

Hans, really appreciate you taking the time from Tokyo to talk with me today.

Have a great one and thanks for joining us.

You bet, Jake. Thank you.

That's Daily Drive for today. I'm Kellan Walker.

Thanks to our own Molly Boygon, Irvash Kakaria,

and Jack Wallsworth for their reporting for today's podcast.

You can get the latest news on manufacturing, gas prices and EV demand,

and everything happening in the auto industry at AutoNews.com.

Come back tomorrow for a conversation with a programmer

about how he used an AI agent to negotiate with dealerships

and saved 4,200 bucks on a new Hyundai Palisade,

all without stepping foot in a showroom until pickup.

It's certainly 100 times easier than it was three years ago.

I may be a thousand times easier than it was two or three years ago.

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March 18, 2026 | NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang says AV tech is 'solved'; Nissan's last laugh

About this episode

NVIDIA

self-driving tech

used EV dealers

Nissan

Bristol Bullet

Honda

gasoline prices

EV searches

canceled EVs

Volvo EX30 electric crossover

import tariffs

ray tracing

autonomous vehicles

simulation system

training system

autonomous driving (AD)

multi trillion dollar business

merger

Mitsubishi

balance sheet

EV trend

loss of incentives

Honda Prologue

Phasing out internal combustion by 2040

right sizing

global production footprint

economy of scale

autonomous driving company

AI company

Hyundai Palisade

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