TIER IV will put Autoware and its driving models on Renesas R-Car Gen 5 chips

TIER IV said on August 20 that it is collaborating with Renesas Electronics to build an open computing platform for software-defined vehicles, combining its autonomous driving software with Renesas’ next-generation automotive system-on-chips.

Under the collaboration, TIER IV will adopt the R-Car Gen 5 family as a primary reference computing platform for Autoware, the open-source autonomous driving software it develops. The company said it will port and optimize Autoware and its end-to-end reference AI models onto the family, and develop AI accelerators for transformer-based driving models along with next-generation sensing technologies including lidar and 4D radar.

TIER IV said the combination is intended to deliver systems spanning Level 2+ and Level 2++ driver assistance through Level 4 automated driving, and that the aim is an open hardware and software platform allowing AI-powered vehicles to keep evolving after production. It said it initiated the collaboration with Renesas in order to expand the open ecosystem around Autoware.

A first public demonstration of Autoware and the reference AI models running on the R-Car X5H is planned for Automotive World 2026 at Makuhari Messe, from September 9 to 11. The announcement set no date for production availability and named no vehicle program.

Shinpei Kato, TIER IV’s founder and chief executive, said in the release that software-defined vehicles need “computing platforms that allow those models to run efficiently, safely and at scale in production vehicles.”