Pony.ai and Meituan Reach Strategic Cooperation

On March 23rd, Pony.ai announced a strategic cooperation agreement with Meituan to jointly promote the commercial application of its autonomous driving technology in the field of distribution, IT home reported.

Pony.ai, founded in Guangzhou at the end of 2016, is the first company in the world to launch automated driving services in China and the United States. The company has already set up R&D centers in Silicon Valley, Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai, and has obtained the necessary qualifications and licenses for automated driving testing and operations in China and the United States.

Under the cooperation, Pony.ai will tailor an automated driving domain controller for Meituan‘s distribution business, so that this business can be quickly scaled and put into practice.

At present, small-scale delivery of domain controllers has already been deployed and will be expanded to 10,000 units in 2024. Data shows that in 2022, China’s instant delivery orders exceeded 40 billion orders, and the market size reached about 200 billion yuan. (about $29.30 billion)

Previously, Meituan automatic distribution vehicles entered normal trial operations in Beijing, Shenzhen and other cities in 2020, with over 500 vehicles in service, with an average daily operation of over 16 hours, and automated driving mileage accounting for over 98%. By the end of 2022, Meituan automatic delivery vehicles had delivered over 2.77 million orders to users.

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Pony.ai’s domain controller is based on the dual NVIDIA DRIVE Orin System on Chip (SoC). It is predicted that in the next three years, Meituan will implement an automatic distribution service of food deliveries, grocery shopping, flash purchases and other business in many regions and cities in China.