Pony.ai, Toyota China and GAC Toyota will launch thousands of Platinum 4X self-driving taxis in the Chinese market

On April 25, Pony.ai, Toyota China, and GAC Toyota announced at the Beijing Auto Show that the three-party joint venture is about to complete the registration, and plans to launch the first phase of 1,000-scale Platinum 4X autonomous vehicles into the Chinese market, with the production line rolling off the production line. Afterwards, it was seamlessly connected to the Pony.ai Robotaxi operating platform to launch large-scale fully driverless travel services in first-tier domestic cities.

On August 4, 2023, Pony.ai signed a joint venture agreement with Toyota China and GAC Toyota for related businesses. The three parties jointly invested more than 1 billion yuan to jointly promote the large-scale mass production and service implementation of L4 autonomous taxis (Robotaxi). . Through the joint venture, the three parties are carrying out joint research and development and production planning of the first Platinum 4X Robotaxi model, steadily advancing the goal of commercialization of fully autonomous driving.

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In addition to cooperating in the research and development of Robotaxi vehicle software and hardware, Pony.ai and Toyota are also simultaneously laying out and building a supporting autonomous driving operation value chain, including autonomous vehicle maintenance and repair, charging and recharging, cleaning, etc., to serve city-level L4 Robotaxi Provide guarantee of stable transportation capacity.

The joint venture integrates Pony.ai’s fully autonomous driving technology capabilities that have been proven in first-tier cities, as well as Toyota’s experience in fully autonomous vehicle platforms, redundant design, and new energy vehicle R&D and manufacturing, and injects them into Robotaxi Mass production of vehicle models and driverless system solutions are under development. This will be the key for Pony.ai and Toyota to lead the development of the L4 autonomous driving industry in the next five years.

From April 25 to May 4, the Platinum 4X Robotaxi concept car jointly developed by Pony.ai and Toyota was unveiled at the Beijing Auto Show, releasing the car-grade appearance and product concept of the first Robotaxi model in advance. This model is planned to be equipped with Pony.ai’s seventh-generation self-driving passenger car system solution, with the goal of commercializing self-driving products and making the technology highly stable and reliable for promoting Robotaxi throughout the city.

Pony.ai and Toyota jointly develop the first Robotaxi model starting from product definition, and will promote the overall design of the autonomous driving system and vehicle platform through forward design and verification processes, thereby effectively controlling the BOM cost of the hardware. Taking the sensor kit as an example, it mainly uses cost-effective automotive-grade sensors such as solid-state lidar, cameras, and millimeter-wave radar, and splits the design of the front and rear modules to make the shape lighter, thinner and more beautiful.

Since Pony.ai and Toyota became strategic partners for autonomous driving in 2019, through close cooperation between the two parties, the industry has gradually taken shape from scratch, and has built a number of fully autonomous vehicles in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other places. Driving demonstration application benchmark. At present, intelligent connected cars and autonomous driving technology have entered the stage of qualitative change from quantitative change, which is a strategic opening to promote the high-quality development of China's automobile industry and leverage the next trillion-dollar market. The establishment of the joint venture will promote the continuous innovation of Pony.ai and Toyota, explore a sustainable, replicable, and scalable commercialization path for autonomous driving, and help the development of the intelligent connected automobile industry in China and even the world enter a new stage.