Are EVs declining in tide and autonomous driving taking over? CES 2026 opens, and car companies are betting on the “next wave” of AI to take over the steering wheel

The Zhitong Finance App learned that at the CES (International Consumer Electronics) Technology Trade Show held in Las Vegas this week, autonomous driving technology based on cutting-edge AI models seems to dominate, and investors are also betting that artificial intelligence will inject vitality into a traditional manufacturing industry that has long been plagued by slow iteration of core technologies, high investment costs, safety incidents, and regulatory reviews.

At a time when traditional car manufacturers are putting the brakes on comprehensive electric vehicle (EV) transformation plans due to factors such as fierce competition and drastic cuts in government low-carbon subsidies, a large number of suppliers and start-ups in the automotive industry chain are lining up to showcase their latest autonomous driving hardware and software platforms. With Nvidia CEO Hwang In-hoon delivering a major speech at the CES opening event and announcing Nvidia's latest blueprint in cutting-edge technology fields such as data center AI computing power infrastructure, autonomous driving, and humanoid robots, CES 2026 also officially opened. It is expected that at this CES event, car companies will announce a series of collaborations and deals, promising to remove a large amount of driving responsibility from drivers, or plan to completely eliminate the demand for human drivers.

“This year, you'll see the automotive manufacturing industry focus more and more on physical AI and autonomous driving,” said C.J. Finn, head of the US automotive industry at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), adding that the outside world will pay close attention to how companies use AI to solve the challenge of safely launching fully autonomous vehicles. “I really think this connectivity around autonomous driving technology will be the central focus of attention.”

However, it is expected that cutting-edge AI technology will be embedded far beyond automobiles in a range of everyday products for human society — it may also cover everything from robots and wearables to household devices and health technology.

Leaders in the US chip industry, including AI chip giant Nvidia (NVDA.US) CEO Huang Renxun and AMD (AMD.US) CEO Su Zifeng, will be among the main speakers at this year's CES conference.

CES without electric cars

CES 2026 is one of the largest technology exhibitions of the year in the US and will be held from January 6 to 9 this year. The official name of this large-scale technology exhibition is Consumer Electronics Show. Traditionally, it is famous all over the world for releasing the latest consumer electronics technology products such as TVs, laptops, and wearables. However, in recent years, the CES technology exhibition has become one of the most critical destinations for chip giants such as Nvidia, AMD, and Qualcomm to announce high-performance AI computing power infrastructure clusters for large enterprise-side AI data centers, and for automobile manufacturers to release their new electric vehicles.

However, the Trump administration's drastic cuts in incentives and policies that are friendly to electric vehicles, as well as the heavy pressure of long-term high inflation and high interest rates, have drastically cooled demand for electric vehicles in the US and the world. In addition, competition in the global electric vehicle sector has intensified in recent years, forcing many traditional car manufacturers to abandon plans to launch new electric vehicles and reconsider their future strategies.

This upheaval in automobile manufacturing will also be shown at CES this year. This year, most traditional car makers have no plans to release any new or upgraded versions of electric cars — in stark contrast to the past few years, and are instead shifting to fully autonomous vehicles (similar to Tesla Robotaxi) and advanced autonomous driving technology.

Full bet on autonomous driving

First, full-scale commercialization of autonomous vehicles is not easy. High investment, regulatory challenges, and tedious post-crash investigations have forced many small and medium-sized companies to shut down autonomous driving businesses.

However, Tesla (TSLA.US), a leader in electric vehicles, robotics, and autonomous driving technology led by Musk, launched a small-scale fully driverless taxi service with safety monitors in Austin, Texas last year, and Waymo, a subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet (GOOGL.US), has undoubtedly injected new vitality into the global autonomous driving industry.

The Alpamayo family, the big open source autonomous driving AI model announced by Nvidia at the CES opening event on January 6, has undoubtedly made investors focus more on the field of autonomous driving at this CES conference.

According to information, Nvidia CEO Hwang In-hoon launched the big open source autonomous driving AI model family called the Alpamayo family at the CES 2026 exhibition. Hwang In-hoon even called it “the world's first AI model for autonomous vehicles that can think and reason efficiently”, directly challenging Tesla's original FSD fully autonomous driving system.

Nvidia refers to Alpamayo as the “ChatGPT moment for physical AI.” The flagship autonomous driving large model product Alpamayo 1 is a vision-language-action (VLA) model with 10 billion parameters. Unlike traditional autonomous driving systems that only detect objects and plan paths, Alpamayo uses the breakthrough method of “chain AI inference”, which focuses on processing video input and generating driving trajectories, but more importantly, it also outputs the logic behind decisions.

Hwang In-hoon said, “This is not just a driving model, but a model that explains one's own thought process.” At the exhibition, Hwang In-hoon played a demonstration video. Alpamayo can not only drive a car, but also explain his decision-making logic in natural language, such as “If the front vehicle's brake light is on, it may slow down, so I should keep my distance.”

In addition to the Alpamayo family (open/open source inference VLA model), Nvidia also recently launched the AlpaSim simulation tool + Physical AI Open Datasets data set: the official caliber combines them with Alpamayo into a complete closed loop of “model+simulation+data” to improve the safety and verifiability of fully autonomous driving technology.

For Nvidia, the open source strategy focuses on ecological entry, while profits focus on computing power and enterprise-level delivery. For example, an open model and tool chain will significantly lower the development threshold and push more automakers/robot development and manufacturing companies to bind R&D and mass production routes to Nvidia's original computing platforms, thereby driving strong demand for AI computing power platforms (DRIVE), and robot edge side computing platforms (Jetson) for the entire data center cabinet. At CES, Nvidia also promoted the “Rubin 6 in 1” cabinet-level AI computing power infrastructure platform, emphasizing that token costs will be drastically reduced. Essentially, it is to use platform-based computing power supply to take on the huge new AI training/inference workloads brought about by the “physical AI” wave.

At the CES 2026 conference, in addition to focusing on completely unmanned autonomous driving technology, the driver assistance level system for personal vehicles was also improved. Some car companies focused on providing hands-free driving and automatic lane change functions on highways. Some car companies, such as Rivian (RIVN.US), an up-and-coming electric vehicle manufacturer headquartered in the US, aim to introduce “no need to watch” assisted driving functions and achieve fully autonomous driving similar to Tesla FSD on city roads.

Cost concerns remain

After spending billions of dollars in write-offs due to changes in electric vehicle strategies, automobile companies — especially traditional automakers such as Ford and GM — have become more strategic and strategically adjusted in terms of specific capital investment. They are also actively dealing with the negative impact of US President Donald Trump's imposition of higher tariffs on imports of complete vehicles and auto parts.

Notably, many traditional car manufacturers in the US chose to absorb most of the tariff costs rather than pass them on to consumers, thus increasing pressure on profit margins.

Felix Stellmaszek, global head of the automotive and mobility division of Boston Consulting Group (Boston Consulting Group), said that in addition to car companies and investors focusing more on autonomous driving, this cost concern, along with increasing competitive pressure from major Asian automakers, will also be the focus of attention of car companies and investors at CES.

“In fact, one of the main topics we expect to see frequently appearing at CES is that car companies focus on cost and broader cost competitiveness.” Stellmaszek displayed.