Pony.ai and GAC Lingcheng start production of the T9 L4 electric heavy truck

The first mass-production batch of T9 autonomous heavy trucks developed by Pony.ai and GAC Lingcheng New Energy Commercial Vehicle Co. came off the line at the Conghua plant in Guangzhou on October 29, according to Sina Finance, which attributes the event to GAC Lingcheng’s own channel. Neither company’s press site carries a record of it: Pony.ai’s Chinese press index, whose newest entry is dated October 23, has nothing on the line-off.

The vehicle itself is documented first-hand. Pony.ai’s own account of the September 14 world premiere at IAA Transportation in Hannover describes the truck as a member of its fourth-generation autonomous truck family, built on the GAC Lingcheng T9 battery-electric heavy truck, and states that it pairs Pony.ai’s fourth-generation Level 4 system with GAC Lingcheng’s fully redundant by-wire chassis, with redundancy across six systems: steering, braking, communication, power, compute and sensors. The sensor set is given as nine lidars, three millimeter-wave radars and thirteen cameras, with the same domain controller as the company’s seventh-generation robotaxi. Pony.ai said the driving kit’s bill of materials costs 70 percent less than the previous generation and that transport cost per tonne-kilometer would fall 30 percent, with a drag coefficient of 0.4 contributing to roughly 10 percent lower energy use than a conventional truck.

The two companies signed a strategic agreement on April 16, five months before the premiere. Pony.ai named He Xing, general manager of its truck business unit, and GAC Lingcheng named Du Peiyuan, its chief operating officer and chief executive of the MONTX brand. At Hannover the company also said its robotruck business would enter Europe and the Middle East within two years, and that the partners intended to build capacity at the thousand-vehicle level.