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

Welcome to Daily Drive for Thursday, March 18th, 2026, I'm Kellan Walker in Las Vegas

today on the show.

In video CEO, Jensen Huang, says he's convinced self-driving tech has already solved problem.

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

And Audi's 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 tough love

revival plan, then meanwhile Honda has 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.

Car guru 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 six bucks

a gallon.

Meanwhile, the list of canceled EVs continues to grow.

Volvo is dropping its compact EX-30 electric crossover in the US, and it's not because

the car was bad.

One dealer told Automotive News the EX-30 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 EX-30 will stick around in Canada and Mexico, but US production wraps up this summer.

And Audi is 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, Gerard Nott Dolner, says they listen to what American customers wanted this time.

A spacious interior with six captains' chairs that works as a chauffeur vehicle.

The timing 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.

Hi, Jensen.

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 crude business

used to be 0% of our business.

But it was 90% of our cost.

And any sane person would have given up on that.

But none of you would be in this reminder.

And so when we first introduced the program at a shader in 2025 years ago, nobody knew

how to use it.

Nobody wanted to pay for it.

No benchmarking site thought it was a good idea.

Is we were to give it up on that program and shading one of the 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, do we both seem pat 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 decide whether you want to pursue

it or not.

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

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

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

of the constructions.

We now have a few thousand people working on our abt.

You say that it's one percent, however, remember, invaders and tons of vehicle business

includes three computers, there's the training system, the synthetic data generation and

simulation system and other 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 sport training and he say does way, so does why.

So does, you know, every single accountable company in the world who is working in

80 of 80 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 fully believe

the times you're able is a solve problem.

It took us ten years to get here.

It's definitely a solve problem.

The rest of this is engineering requirement, in ten years, someday, one trillion miles

per day will be a hundred percent 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 to the world will definitely go up and if, let's say, it's two trillion miles

a day, a year, pick your figure number for dollars for, for, for my own, it is a multi-trillion

dollar business.

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

It's a, I'm perfectly fine at being zero.

I still believe what I believe.

In video CEO, Jensen Huang spoke with our own Molly Boygon at Nvidia GTC in San Jose.

During another part of the round table, Huang gave a shout out to automotive newsist, Centennial

Coffee Tablebook.

There's actually a chapter of being in that book, I just want to tell you how far I'm

from.

I have something to do.

I am in the automotive industry, the handing forward that was in there, I'm in there.

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 and where you can improve.

And we've expanded the categories this year, recognizing everything from technician experience

in leadership development to AI enablement and employee retention.

The registration deadline is April 17th, find out more and apply at autonews.com.

Welcome back to Daily Drive, I'm Kellen 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 Ivan Espinoza, is cutting costs aggressively and starting

to stabilize.

Honda has a column on autonews.com, arguing that Nissan dodged a 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 in retrospect, there's a lot to learn, I think, from what

happened with this.

Just 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 in kind

of a quasi-merger of equals this year, 2026, that was a 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 8 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 Mibesan 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 it for the 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 flipped locked 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.

It wasn't, 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 a 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 biggest, the world's biggest

makers of internal combustion engines because you remember, not only has a automotive division,

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

And it also has a huge power plant maker that makes things like law moors 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 that

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

Let's talk a little bit about the leadership of both these companies.

As you mentioned, Nissan has a new CEO.

We'll talk about Ivan Espinoza in a second.

When it comes to Mimebe, he says he is forfitting 30% of his pay at Honda for three months

over this.

You know, 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, you know, that's a good question.

I hear from analysts and the investor community here and people from the outside looking

in that, you know, they're not happy with the direction that Mimebe has led the company.

You know, first, his overaggression 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, you

know, billions and billions of dollars of wasted money on this bad, bad 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 reelected

as the president this year and June at the annual shareholder meeting.

So you know, 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, five, six years.

So he could be coming up for a rotation.

Well, let's talk about Iván Espanosa, as I mentioned.

And, you know, he's been, he's been CEO at Nissan for less than a year now.

But in that time, you know, you mentioned that he's got a pretty bold turnaround plant

here.

And 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.

He's really slashing the global food production footprint, bringing the costs in line

with its capacity, basically.

So that is a neat 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 write 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, as 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 source 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 with 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 sort of 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 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.

We saw companies combining and mergers as kind of the panacea, that's 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 leapfrog ahead in terms of technology, if not in terms of scale.

So instead of combining a Nissan with a Honda, combined a Nissan with a tech company, it

could be a AI company, it could be a 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 in failed Nissan Honda merger, Nissan has the

last laugh written by my colleague Hans Grimal, 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 Kellen Walker.

Thanks to our own Molly Boygon, Urbosh 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 4200 bucks on a new Hyundai Palisade, all without

stepping foot in a showroom until pickup.

It's certainly 100 times easier than it was 3 years ago, maybe a thousand times easier

than it was 2 or 3 years ago.

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