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The new Mercedes CLA BEV just went on sale. It is not only a software-defined vehicle (SDV) but also an AI-defined vehicle (ADV).

It uses Nvidia’s new Alpamayo AI self-driving system. It features five radars, a dozen ultrasonic sensors, and ten cameras to ensure a highly safe and redundant self-driving system.

The vehicles are still being trained, and more self-driving features toward SAE Level 4 will be gradually released via over-the-air (OTA) updates over the coming months and years.

The car itself is affordable by today’s standards, especially for a luxury vehicle equipped with a full suite of cutting-edge technology.

The biggest catch: You will have to pay a subscription fee for the self-driving features, which is around $100 a month.

Driving (Mostly) Hands-Free In a 2026 Mercedes-Benz CLA

Unlike Tesla’s system, which is a garbage-in, garbage-out black box, Nvidia’s Alpamayo self-driving system can think like ChatGPT. Nvidia claims it will be better than Google’s Waymo, but that will have to be seen.

“The ChatGPT moment for physical AI is here — when machines begin to understand, reason, and act in the real world,” said Nvidia (Nasdaq ticker NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang at CES in Las Vegas

Nvidia takes on Tesla with what Jensen Huang calls the 'ChatGPT moment' for self-driving

Nvidia is trying to improve self-driving beyond Waymo. They just unveiled their Alpamayo self-driving technology, which uses a chain-of-thought reasoning-based vision language action (VLA) model. These models can recognize unique driving situations that might not otherwise happen during a regular drive and come up with the proper way to move forward.

Lucid is the first OEM interested in adopting it, and Uber and Berkeley DeepDrive are also interested in it.

Nvidia announces humanoid robot plans, self-driving car technologies at CES 2026