arXiv:2410.15281v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: With the broader adoption and highly successful development of Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been growing interest and demand for applying LLMs to autonomous driving technology. Driven by their natural language understanding and reasoning capabilities, LLMs have the potential to enhance various aspects of autonomous driving systems, from perception and scene understanding to interactive decision-making. In this paper, we first introduce the novel concept of designing Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving (LLM4AD), followed by a review of existing LLM4AD studies. Then, we propose a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the instruction-following and reasoning abilities of LLM4AD systems, which includes LaMPilot-Bench, CARLA Leaderboard 1.0 Benchmark in simulation and NuPlanQA for multi-view visual question answering. Furthermore, we conduct extensive real-world experiments on autonomous vehicle platforms, examining both on-cloud and on-edge LLM deployment for personalized decision-making and motion control. Next, we explore the future trends of integrating language diffusion models into autonomous driving, exemplified by the proposed ViLaD (Vision-Language Diffusion) framework. Finally, we discuss the main challenges of LLM4AD, including latency, deployment, security and privacy, safety, trust and transparency, and personalization.