Pony.ai reveals fourth generation of autonomous electric trucks
The first two autonomous electric truck models from Pony.ai will be based on Sany Truck and Dongfeng Liuzhou Motor’s battery electric vehicle platforms. These models are designed for mass production in the thousands.
Pony.ai says its Gen-4 Autonomous Truck system will be significantly cheaper to produce than previous generations by utilising “100% automotive-grade components.” The company says this reduces the bill-of-materials costs per vehicle by around 70 per cent compared to the previous generation. Pony.ai has leveraged the majority of components from the latest iteration of its Robotaxi solution.
Costs are not only reduced in terms of materials, but also with efficiency increases. Here, the company gives the example of its “1+4” platooning solution involving a lead truck that uses a human driver, followed by four fully autonomous trucks without a human onboard, which – based on “current trial scenarios” – is supposed to reduce freight costs by 29 per cent per kilometre and significantly increase profit margins.
The new trucking system is equipped with a “fully redundant drive-by-wire chassis” featuring comprehensive redundancy across steering, braking, communication, power supply, computing, and sensors. A Pony.ai media release in Chinese describes how the new system overcomes the problem that traditional electronic vehicle architectures cannot support future complex applications and systems such as autonomous driving. The description (with diagrams in English) explains that the “redundancy” talked about is a system that brings the vehicle’s electronic systems under one central electronic architecture.
Pony.ai entered the autonomous trucking market in 2018. Since then, the company says it has expanded its fleet to around 200 trucks, and has secured autonomous truck road test permits and freight transport operation licenses “in multiple regions across China.”
Just last month, in October 2025, Stellantis and Pony.ai formed a partnership to develop robotaxis in Europe, after having joined forces with Uber and WeRide earlier in the year. For its part, Chinese electric truck maker Sany is also already active in Europe and announced in September 2025 that it aims to make a mark with long-haul electric trucks in the region.
For the moment, the fourth-generation autonomous truck system from Pony.ai will be putting its new trucking systems on roads with mass production in China from 2026 onwards.
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