Einride will test Nvidia’s Alpamayo, a reasoning-based AI driving model, inside the Einride Driver, its autonomous driving system, the company said Wednesday. The Swedish company plans to adapt the model to its own vehicles, routes, and operating data, with a live road evaluation planned for the second half of 2027.
The project extends the collaboration Einride announced Sept. 21 to build its next-generation driving system on Nvidia’s Hyperion platform. Adapting Alpamayo is designed to shorten development cycles and reduce the cost of extending the Einride Driver to new vehicle types and routes, Einride said. Neither company disclosed financial terms.
New vehicle types are already on Einride’s schedule. Einride, DAF, and TNO are defining and testing how to integrate Einride’s autonomous system into DAF’s electric truck platform through 2026, with software integration and commissioning scheduled for 2027.
Einride had more than 5,400 driverless hours in contracted customer operations across six autonomous deployments in the U.S. and Europe as of June 30, according to its first-half 2026 results. The company tied the Alpamayo decision to that record.
“Our advantage has always been running autonomous freight in the real world, for real customers,” said Henrik Green, Einride’s chief technology officer.
What Alpamayo is built to do
Nvidia introduced the Alpamayo family at CES in January. It described Alpamayo 1 as a 10-billion-parameter vision language action model that uses video input to generate driving trajectories with reasoning traces.
The Alpamayo models “serve as large-scale teacher models” that developers fine-tune and distill into smaller models for their own driving systems, Nvidia said. In May, Nvidia launched Alpamayo 2 Super, a 34-billion-parameter teacher model built to be distilled into compact models that run on DRIVE AGX Thor, Hyperion’s in-vehicle computer. The release does not say which Alpamayo model Einride will use.
The company will post-train and distill Alpamayo on its proprietary operational data. In shadow mode, the model runs live without controlling the vehicle. Its outputs are compared against Einride’s driving planner and human driver performance while existing safety systems stay in full control.
PlusAI also adapting Alpamayo for trucks
Einride said it plans to be the first trucking company to deploy Alpamayo on Hyperion. PlusAI said in March it is adapting Alpamayo for heavy-duty trucking on Level 4 trucks built on Nvidia’s DRIVE AGX Hyperion platform. It expects fully driverless commercial operations on those factory-built trucks to begin in 2027.
Einride’s claim turns on what counts as deploying. Green described the company’s position in narrower terms.
“Being the first trucking company in this engagement gives us the opportunity to help shape the model for freight,” he said.
Nvidia framed the Alpamayo work as exploratory.
“By combining Nvidia Alpamayo and Nvidia Halos safety system with Einride’s real-world freight data and safety engineering on Hyperion, we’re exploring how reasoning-based AI can help trucks navigate complex driving conditions and accelerate development for new routes and vehicle types,” said Rishi Dhall, Nvidia’s vice president of automotive.
Why it matters: Einride is betting that Nvidia’s Alpamayo, trained on its own freight data, can cut the cost of putting the Einride Driver on new trucks and routes. In shadow mode, the model won’t control a vehicle, and a live road evaluation is planned for late 2027.
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