Pony.ai’s Post

#LegendCapital #PortfolioNews Our portfolio company, Pony.ai, has commenced "driver out" autonomous vehicle testing on Beijing’s expressways and highways, becoming one of the first companies to achieve this milestone. Covering nearly 90 kilometers, the testing routes include key locations such as Beijing Daxing International Airport and Beijing South Railway Station, operating under diverse conditions like peak traffic hours and late-night driving. This marks an important step in advancing autonomous driving technology, reflecting Pony.ai’s progress in shaping the future of intelligent transportation. #AutonomousDriving #SmartMobility

🚗Highways Designated as Pilot Zones for Autonomous Vehicles, Autonomous Freight Transport Begins in Earnest   The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport will designate pilot zones for autonomous freight transport on long-distance routes and highways under the revised "Autonomous Vehicle Act." They will also establish and announce the first licensing standards for autonomous freight transport businesses to reduce industry uncertainty.   Pilot zones are special areas where various regulatory exemptions, such as for paid transport and vehicle safety standards, are granted to demonstrate services using autonomous driving. In January, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport revised the "Autonomous Vehicle Act" to allow the ministry to designate wide-area routes, like highways, as pilot zones through consultations with cities and provinces, even without their formal applications.   The "Autonomous Vehicle Act" allows paid transport services in pilot zones but lacked specific standards for freight transport. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport has now set detailed criteria and procedures for licensing autonomous freight transport businesses, based on expert feedback.   With the conditions now set for autonomous freight transport, Korea Expressway Corporation plans to actively prepare for showcasing autonomous freight transport on highways by signing MOUs with autonomous freight transport companies to ensure mutual cooperation. 👉 If you have any inquiries or need information regarding Korean KC certification, please visit the website www.gca-global.com #GCA #GCAKOREA #SouthKoreaTypeapproval #ProductTesting #KCkorea #KCsafety #KoreaCertification #KC #KCMark #KCcertification #KoreaRRA #RF #Radio #Wireless #AutonomousVehicle

🚗Highways Designated as Pilot Zones for Autonomous Vehicles, Autonomous Freight Transport Begins in Earnest The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport will designate pilot zones for autonomous freight transport on long-distance routes and highways under the revised "Autonomous Vehicle Act." They will also establish and announce the first licensing standards for autonomous freight transport businesses to reduce industry uncertainty. Pilot zones are special areas where various regulatory exemptions, such as for paid transport and vehicle safety standards, are granted to demonstrate services using autonomous driving. In January, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport revised the "Autonomous Vehicle Act" to allow the ministry to designate wide-area routes, like highways, as pilot zones through consultations with cities and provinces, even without their formal applications. The "Autonomous Vehicle Act" allows paid transport services in pilot zones but lacked specific standards for freight transport. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport has now set detailed criteria and procedures for licensing autonomous freight transport businesses, based on expert feedback. With the conditions now set for autonomous freight transport, Korea Expressway Corporation plans to actively prepare for showcasing autonomous freight transport on highways by signing MOUs with autonomous freight transport companies to ensure mutual cooperation. 👉 If you have any inquiries or need information regarding Korean KC certification, please visit the website www.gca-global.com #GCA #GCAKOREA #SouthKoreaTypeapproval #ProductTesting #KCkorea #KCsafety #KoreaCertification #KC #KCMark #KCcertification #KoreaRRA #RF #Radio #Wireless #AutonomousVehicle

The California Department of Motor Vehicles this week granted Nuro approval to test its third-generation R3 autonomous delivery vehicle in four Bay Area cities, giving the AV startup a positive boost after facing some setbacks and financial struggles. The approval gives Nuro the ability to test its driverless delivery vehicle in Mountain View, Palo Alto, Los Altos and Menlo Park. Nuro’s vehicles, which don’t have seats, windows, steering wheels or pedals, aren’t designed to carry passengers, only goods. Despite the fact that they operate on public roads, they look more like large sidewalk delivery robots, complete with temperature-controlled storage units to hold food. The upgraded geographic area will represent the third largest — if not the second largest — deployment of fully driverless vehicles in the United States, after Waymo, co-founder Dave Ferguson told TechCrunch, noting Cruise might have had a larger deployment span before it grounded its fleet late last year. Nuro also has a 10-year commercial deal with Uber Eats that it’s been testing with third-party vehicles. 

Happy to see so much progress on autonomous trucking and ride-hailing, Aurora, Plus, Torc Robotics, Waymo, Kodiak, Gatik, Pony.ai, Zoox and Mobileye you are making an awesome progress in autonomous mobility and it is very inspiring to see how driverless miles are getting more and more. Actually, it is only a matter of time until we see the first vehicles in Europe. In the US and China you are already operating, which is great and promising. Especially Waymo does have a great Safety Research and Best Practices Team led by Trent Victor. Mobileye with RSS and TrueRedundancy. So many good papers are released and especially this brings a high added value to the community and society. Over the past 3-4 years so many great things for autonomous mobility happened besides as well some bad news! An open exchange via LinkedIN is in any case very helpful, since this plattform is used to enhance exchange between companies and as well opponents of autonomous driving. Especially the autonomous driving safety community has grown a lot based on concerns that autonomous vehicles aren't as safe as they should be. And yes, there is always room for improvement. We need make sure that residual risk is kept on an acceptable level and this is not only pure numbers - it is the feeling of accountability to release technology which helps not only the mass, but also the single individual. Trust is the most important and difficult value to keep! Safety is the sum of methodologies, mindsets, cultures and processes in order to make the end-product safe. We all want to trust autonomous mobility and therefore we need to spend our best efforts and contribute to the technology and make it safe!

We believe that the largest long-term potential of autonomous vehicles lies in shared passenger transport. There are certainly “behind the fence” applications for specialized vehicles (warehouses, airports, mines) that are much easier to automate than any public road applications. And even when it comes to deploying on public road, long haul goods transportation applications are probably less demanding than operating an on-demand mobility service. But although both behind the fence specialty vehicles and long-haul logistics have huge market potential, the main goal there is cost reduction and possibly solving the driver shortage and not the disruptive change of our transportation and mobility system that most people consider to be the promise of autonomous vehicles. If you zoom in on the top row of the overview below, we believe automating large busses is somewhat comparable to automation of freight transport: Cost reduction, improved timetables and reducing driver shortage yes, but the general user experience of public transport remains unchanged. And the problem with small vehicles (including retrofitted passenger cars because people simply don’t want to share rides in those) is, that they don’t improve congestion or might even make it worse. In order to really improve people’s everyday lives, autonomous vehicles need to combine the convenience of a privately owned car with the resource efficiency of public transport, and we see the greatest potential to achieve that in medium sized (~4-16 seats), shared vehicles.

#DisruptiveTech 🟢 Developments in autonomous driving in China: ❶ Beijing's New Regulations: Passed on Tuesday to boost autonomous driving tech. Plans to eventually allow driverless public buses and taxis. Autonomous vehicles that pass road testing and safety assessments can apply for road trials starting April 1. ❷ Support for Autonomous Vehicles: Private cars, urban buses, trams, and taxis. Construction of intelligent road infrastructure encouraged. ❸ Wuhan's Initiative: Central Chinese city also approved regulations for intelligent connected vehicles. ❹ Aggressive Trials: 19 cities conducting robotaxi and robobus tests. ❺ Key Players: Apollo Go (Baidu, Inc.): 1,000 robotaxis in Wuhan by end-2024. Pony.ai: Expand fleet nationwide to over 1,000 by 2026. WeRide, AutoX, and SAIC Motor also exploring robotaxi opportunities. ❻ Tesla's Plans: Full self-driving (FSD) to China in Q1 2025 (pending regulatory approval). Producing its own robotaxi in 2026. #AutonomousDriving #TechInnovation #SmartCity #FutureTransport #ChinaTech Campaign Catapult, Pravo Consulting

Volvo and Aurora introduce their first self-driving truck Volvo and Aurora have unveiled their first production autonomous truck, three years after the companies initially announced that they were teaming up. They've just showed off the Volvo VNL Autonomous truck, which was designed by autonomous trucking and robotaxi company Aurora but will be manufactured by Volvo, at ACT Expo in Las Vegas. It's powered by Aurora Driver, a level 4 autonomous driving system that uses high-resolution cameras, imaging radars, a LiDAR sensor that can detect objects up to 400 meters away and even more sensors. Aurora's technology has driven billions of virtual miles for training, as well as 1.5 million commercial miles on actual public roads. For safety purposes, the truck has "redundant steering, braking, communication, computation, power management, energy storage and vehicle motion management systems." According to TechCrunch, the vehicle will still have a human driver behind the wheel to take over whenever needed when it starts ferrying cargo across North America over the next few months. An Aurora spokesperson told the publication that it will be announcing pilot programs with its clients that are planning to use Volvo's truck sometime later this year. It didn't name any companies, but the startup previously ran pilot programs with FedEx and Uber Freight. The autonomous vehicle company also intends to deploy 20 fully driverless trucks between Dallas and Houston soon, but it's unclear if this inaugural fleet of driverless vehicles will be comprised of Volvo's trucks or of its other manufacturing partners'. The companies did say at the Las Vegas event, though, that Volvo has already started manufacturing a test fleet of the VNL Autonomous truck at its New River Valley assembly facility in Virginia. Nils Jaeger, President of Volvo Autonomous Solutions, called this truck the "first of [the company's] standardized global autonomous technology platform." Jaeger added that it will enable Volvo "to introduce additional models in the future." https://lnkd.in/eSPRKZZA

Will 2025 be the race for the next step in autonomous driving? A few weeks ago, Germany announced the claim to play a leading role in autonomous driving, while launching the largest contiguous area for self-driving vehicles in the world. Beijing, just announced plans to boost driverless vehicle use, with new regulations to encourage autonomous driving technology with authorities planning to eventually allow driverless public buses and taxis. What will 2025 will bring for us? Will countries learn from each other's advancement and policy making or will it be a race for achieving the next milestone? https://lnkd.in/e6-7FQ4z.