Pony, investor Toyota associate to ‘mass produce’ robotaxis in China | TechCrunch

Autonomous-driving firm Pony.ai and Toyota say they’re teaming up with the aim of at some point cranking out a bunch of “absolutely driverless robotaxis.”

The 2 corporations intend to kick off their partnership someday this yr with round $139 million in capital from GAC Toyota Motor Co. — a three way partnership between Toyota China and GAC, a Chinese language state-owned automaker.

The funding follows Toyota’s transfer to pump about $400 million into Pony again in 2020. Going ahead, Toyota says it’ll give Pony an unspecified variety of its EVs, whereas Pony will outfit them with autonomous-driving tech and the agency’s “robotaxi community platform.” 

With out context, $139 million could sound like rather a lot, however Pony has raised greater than a billion {dollars} since its founding in 2016. Issues arguably haven’t gone easily all through the self-driving developer’s lifetime.

In 2021, Pony kicked off driverless-vehicle testing in California, solely to see its allow suspended six months later. The identical yr, the corporate appeared to shrink its autonomous trucking ambitions when it consolidated its R&D groups and shed a couple executives. The following yr, Pony recalled its autonomous-driving software and sued two former staffers for allegedly swiping commerce secrets and techniques once they left to discovered a startup known as Qingtian Truck. But, across the identical time, Pony claimed to be worth $8.5 billion (and that’s the final we’ve heard of its valuation to this point).

Pony isn’t alone in its trials. All the autonomous car business, as soon as a darling within the VC world, has gone by way of a consolidation that has seen quite a few startups wither and disappear, significantly in the USA. The few that stay — a small group of well-funded corporations which are both publicly traded or owned by massive companies — are beginning to scale up industrial operations, albeit slower than maybe initially forecast.