AutoBeta(AutoBeta.net)04/29 Report--

According to Tianyan check information, Fengfeng Intelligent Technology (Guangzhou) Co., Ltd. was established on April 26, with the legal representative of Mo Luyi and a registered capital of 798 million yuan. It is an enterprise mainly engaged in science and technology promotion and application service industry. On the same day, Pony Horse Zhihang officially announced that the joint venture "Fengfeng Intelligent Technology (Guangzhou) Co., Ltd." of Xiaoma Zhihang, Toyota China and Guangzhou Auto Toyota was officially registered.

At present, Fengfeng Intelligent Technology (Guangzhou) Co., Ltd. is jointly owned by Guangzhou Pony Huixing Technology Co., Ltd., Toyota Motor (China) Investment Co., Ltd., and Guangzhou Automobile Toyota Motor Co., Ltd., with a shareholding ratio of 50%, 32.77% and 17.23%, respectively.

On August 4, 2023, Toyota Motor (China) Investment Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Toyota China"), Xiaoma Zhixing and Guangzhou Automobile Toyota Motor Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Guangzhou Automobile Toyota") held a signing ceremony, the three announced the joint venture company, in order to promote L4 self-driving pre-loading mass production. According to the agreement, the joint venture company will invest more than 1 billion yuan and will provide a Toyota pure electric vehicle platform for Robotaxi produced by GAC Toyota. These vehicles are equipped with a redundancy system provided by Toyota for fully self-driving vehicles, equipped with Pony Horse Zhixing's autopilot system, and put into use through the pony Zhixing Robotaxi operating platform.

It is understood that Zhou Xiaoyun, director of Toyota's foreign strategic cooperation in China, said that the management of the joint venture company will be held by the senior management of the three parties. With regard to the establishment of the new company, Xiaoma Zhihang officially said that the newly established company will be committed to promoting the innovation and application of intelligent driving technology. According to the plan, the first phase plans to introduce 1000-scale Platinum Intelligence 4X Robotaxi to the Chinese market and provide self-driving Robotaxi travel services in major first-tier cities through the operating platform of Horse Zhihang.

In fact, this is not the first time Toyota and Horse Zhihang have worked together. As early as August 2019, Toyota cooperated with Horse Zhihang to promote the development of self-driving vehicles for mobile travel services in China. In September of the same year, the two sides began to promote self-driving cooperation projects on open roads in China, using Toyota's Lexus brand RX model and pony Zhihang autopilot system.

At the Beijing auto show, the Platinum Zhixing 4X Robotaxi concept car jointly developed by Horse Zhixing and Toyota was unveiled for the first time, officially called "driverless, the next generation", which will be equipped with the seventh generation self-driving passenger car system.

Platinum Intelligence, a new brand of Guangzhou Automobile Toyota New Energy, was launched in November 2023. The first pure electric model, Platinum Intelligence 4X, is on the market at the same time, with a price ranging from 179800 to 238800 yuan. This time, Horse Zhixing and Toyota jointly developed the first Robotaxi model from the product definition, and officials said that they would more effectively control the cost of hardware BOM, and take the sensor kit as an example to illustrate, mainly selecting cost-effective vehicle gauge-level sensors such as solid-state lidar, camera and millimeter wave radar, and by splitting the design of the front and rear modules to make the shape lighter and more beautiful.

In April this year, Horse Zhixing announced through its official Weibo that a new generation of Robotaxi models equipped with the sixth-generation L4 self-driving hardware system of Horse Zhixing took the lead in open road testing in Beijing's Yizhuang high-level self-driving demonstration zone, which is based on the Toyota Sena Autono-Maas (S-AM) model. On February 2 this year, the Toyota Sina self-driving passenger car (Robotaxi), which is equipped with the sixth-generation L4 self-driving software and hardware system, was allowed to launch the self-driving demonstration application of "no one in the car, long-distance outside the car" in Beijing. At present, the car has carried out fully unmanned self-driving passenger tests in both Beijing and Guangzhou.

Data show that Xiaoma Zhixing, founded in Silicon Valley at the end of 2016, is one of the representatives of domestic self-driving companies, co-founded by Peng Jun and Lou Tiancheng, and is headquartered in Guangzhou. According to Tianyan information, Pony Horse has received a total of nine rounds of financing, with a total financing amount of more than 1.1 billion US dollars, including Sequoia Capital, IDG Capital, Morningside Capital, Junlian Capital, Siming Investment, Toyota, FAW Group and so on. On March 7, 2022, Horse Zhihang completed its first D-round financing with a valuation of US $8.5 billion, making it the highest valued company among self-driving start-ups in China.

It is worth mentioning that self-driving is a relatively high-cost project. Han Xu, CEO of Wenyuan Zhixing, a self-driving company, has said bluntly that the company has been spending $100m a year. Pony Zhihang said that after the establishment of the joint venture, the joint venture will promote continuous innovation between Horse Zhixing and Toyota. In addition to cooperative research and development in the field of software and hardware for Toyota Robotaxi vehicles, it will also lay out and build a supporting self-driving operation value chain, including self-driving vehicle maintenance, charging and cleaning, so as to provide stable capacity guarantee for city-level L4 Robotaxi services.

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