(credit: Aptiv)

Few people want to go to Las Vegas immediately after the New Year. Never a fan of the place at the best of times, I dutifully boarded the plane anyway. Like it or not, if one wants to see everyone’s ideas for the car of the near future, there’s no better time and place to do that than CES.

There’s an irony to hearing about smart mobility at CES considering all the dumb reality outside. The show has grown so much that getting from the convention center to anything off-site now takes an hour if you’re unlucky. Figure in a lot of needed—but unwanted—rain that caused havoc with self-driving demos and electrical transformers and the whole thing became an ordeal.

Chips ahoy!

That ordeal kicked off days before the main exhibit hall even opened. It’s fitting that Nvidia started the proceedings on Sunday; its graphics chips bear more responsibility than most for the blossoming of autonomy. The latest of these is called Xavier, and if things go Nvidia’s way, they’ll be found under every robo-taxi’s access panel. Nvidia is forming big partnerships: Baidu, Uber, and Volkswagen Group are three of the latest names to be announced.