Pony.ai unveils Gen-4 Robotruck with GAC and targets European road tests

Pony.ai unveiled a fourth-generation Level 4 electric Robotruck with GAC Commercial Vehicle at the IAA Transportation fair in Hanover — a heavy truck that can drive itself in set conditions — and said it is talking to European governments, ports, and possible customers about road tests, with volume production slated later this year and a stated plan to enter Europe and the Middle East within two years.

Driverless freight just moved from China routes onto a European trade-fair floor. Pony.ai says the truck is headed for volume production later this year and that it is already talking to ports and governments about tests — a concrete FUTURE filing, not another passenger-taxi demo.

Pony.ai — Pony AI Inc., listed as Nasdaq: PONY and in Hong Kong as 2026 — said via PR Newswire from Hanover, Germany, that it unveiled a new Level 4 autonomous heavy-duty truck built with GAC Commercial Vehicle at IAA Transportation 2026. Level 4, as Reuters explains it here, means the truck can drive itself without a human driver in set conditions and zones. The company calls the truck one model in its fourth-generation — Gen-4 — Robotruck lineup. That company release, dated 14 Sep 2026 at 08:13 ET, is the filing event.

The new vehicle sits on GAC Commercial Vehicle’s T9 battery-electric heavy-duty truck platform, the company says. Volume production is scheduled to begin later this year. Planned jobs, as Pony.ai lists them: long-haul freight, dedicated-route logistics, and port transportation. This is not a claim that production has started, and it is not a claim that Europe has licensed driverless trucks.

The truck, as the release describes it, pairs Pony.ai’s Gen-4 Level 4 trucking system with GAC’s fully redundant drive-by-wire chassis — a chassis where steering and braking are electronic, with backup copies of the important parts. Steering, braking, communications, power, computing, and sensing all have fully redundant architectures, the company says.

The autonomous driving kit — the sensors and computers that do the driving — is listed as nine lidars, three millimeter-wave radars, and 13 cameras, for 360-degree sensing with no blind spots. Lidar is a laser scanner that maps distance. The kit uses the same domain controller, the main onboard computer, as Pony.ai’s seventh-generation Robotaxis.

Company-claimed cost and energy figures, all Pony.ai’s expected numbers: the kit’s bill-of-materials cost — what the parts cost to buy — is down 70% versus the previous generation; transport cost per ton-kilometer is expected to fall 30%; energy use is expected to drop 10% versus conventional trucks, helped by energy-efficiency software and a T9 drag coefficient of 0.4 Cd. Cd is a measure of how easily air slides past the truck; lower is slipperier. Those percentages are company expectations. They are not Bad Signal-measured, and they are not an independent freight audit.

He Xing, vice president of Pony.ai and head of the Robotruck business, said the Hanover debut “marks another important step in accelerating the mass production and commercial deployment of Pony.ai’s Robotrucks,” and that the companies will “bring our jointly developed autonomous trucking solutions to markets around the world.” This is not a signed Europe sales contract.

The new truck extends Pony.ai’s partnership with GAC Group from Robotaxi into Robotruck, the company says. Pony.ai and GAC Commercial Vehicle signed a strategic cooperation agreement on April 16. Within five months, the companies say they finished vehicle testing and validation ahead of the formal launch.

Pony.ai says it began developing Robotrucks in 2018 and now has a mix of heavy- and light-duty trucks. The company was founded in 2016. It applies the same Virtual Driver stack — the company’s name for its driving software plus hardware — across Robotaxis, heavy trucks, and light trucks. This filing is the Gen-4 T9 debut only.

International plan, as the company states it: expand Robotruck into Europe and the Middle East over the next two years, using China operations plus overseas Robotaxi experience. Named Robotaxi markets on the same page: the UAE, Qatar, Croatia, Luxembourg, Singapore, and South Korea. This is not a claim that Robotruck tests have started in those countries.

Reuters’ Nick Carey, writing the same day from the Hanover show, reported that Pony.ai is talking to European governments and possible customers about road tests on the continent. He Xing told Reuters: “We’ve already approached several ports and some (European) governments on the topic” of testing. And: “We are looking at markets where labour costs are expensive or the labour shortage is severe… which definitely makes Europe an important market for robotic trucks.” Talking is not a granted test permit.

Reuters also reports that Pony.ai already has a couple of hundred Level 4 trucks on routes in China — some fully driverless, others with a human safety driver — and that only a handful of European countries have rules that allow self-driving vehicle tests.