Chinese autonomous mobility startup Pony.ai announced that it will form a joint venture with SANY Heavy Truck, a subsidiary of heavy equipment manufacturer SANY Heavy Industry.
The joint venture between Pony.ai and SANY Heavy Truck covers the development, production and sale of the L4 autonomous heavy truck and creates a high-end autonomous truck brand.
The joint venture targets the delivery of small-scale robot trucks in 2022 and 2023. Meanwhile, mass production of L4 trucks will begin in 2024 with an annual production capacity of 10,000 trucks.
The first autonomous truck prototype built on SANY’s new energy truck platform has gone through road testing. Pony.ai’s autonomous driving controller (ADC) will be used in the smart trucks produced by the joint venture.
The joint venture will combine Pony.ai’s virtual driver technology capabilities with SANY’s chassis technology to develop a durable, high-end L4 smart heavy-duty truck product.
Last month, Pony.ai officially delivered samples of its autonomous driving controller (ADC) to customers based on NVIDIA’s DRIVE Hyperion computing architecture and Orin’s DRIVE system-on-chip, with volume production of domain controllers set to begin in the fourth quarter.
The ADC developed by Pony.ai comes in two versions, with one and two DRIVE Orin chips, each with a computing power of 254 TOPS and 508 TOPS.
Vehicles with ADC from Pony.ai can perform a variety of smart driving functions on busy urban open roads as well as expressways, the company said.
