The first self-driving cars of Pony.ai, a self-driving vehicle startup, recently rolled off the assembly line and will start all-weather public urban road tests in Guangzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai.

"It is a milestone for Pony.ai, especially for the company's attempts to realize standardization and mass production," said Lou Tiancheng, co-founder and CTO of Pony.ai.

"Our goal is to achieve 'autonomous driving within reach', and change people's way of travel through artificial intelligence technology around the world," Lou added.

Pony.ai is committed to enabling more people to experience smart cars and smart travel, said Pony.ai co-founder and CEO Peng Jun. 

Realization of autonomous driving technology in a large-scale manner has a long way to go, from research of hardware modules and building of new production lines to mass production and verification of vehicles. 

Peng said Pony.ai has achieved a breakthrough from zero to one and gained experience for the mass production of fully autonomous vehicles.

Self-driving cars of Pony.ai

In 2020, Beijing made great efforts to support autonomous driving demonstration operation in specific areas. Enterprises in Beijing E-Town, or the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, took the lead in entering the new stage of exploring the commercial application of autonomous driving.

Forty-three vehicles equipped with Baidu Apollo were approved to carry out the third phase of manned tests, and five conducted the first phase of unmanned tests. In addition, five vehicles of Pony.ai were allowed to conduct the first phase of manned tests.

Beijing also started construction of the world's first network-connected cloud-controlled high-level autonomous driving demonstration zone in the Beijing E-Town, and has now completed the zone's 1.0 stage.

In addition, Beijing E-Town has 322 kilometers of road sections for autonomous driving tests, the first fully public autonomous driving test zone in China, and the field-road-zone three-level test environment has been completed for the first time.

The upgraded public test environment has attracted autonomous driving companies to the Beijing E-Town to carry out tests and transform their scientific and technological achievements.