Nvidia seems to be accelerating its connected car progress, this week announcing a deal with ZF and Hella to combine their offerings, as well as a deal with Volvo and Autoliv to drive the Zenuity joint-venture for self-driving software. It comes in the same week that Waymo has started bringing its LiDAR designs to trucks, as its truck-related Otto-Uber lawsuit rumbles on. For Nvidia, the self-driving vehicle market is becoming an increasingly core focus for the GPU developer – expanding from its traditional consumer video card market, into AI-focused server-grade accelerator cards, and now into the silicon that powers the sensor-fusion boards in these increasingly autonomous vehicles. Its GPUs act as the brains that make sense of the multitude of…