Pony.ai is moving from industrial-grade solutions to more reliable automotive-grade ones, which will enable the autonomous driving startup to accelerate the roll-out of Level 4 vehicles.

In a statement on Thursday, the company said the auto-grade products will be mass-production ready, with the start of production slated for the end of 2022.

Pony said this is the result of a complete autonomous computing unit it has developed built on the Nvidia Drive Orin system-on-chip, marking a significant milestone.

Nvidia Drive Orin achieves 254 trillion operations per second of performance and includes comprehensive Cuda and Nvidia deep learning accelerator toolchain support.

"By leveraging the world-class Nvidia Drive Orin SoC, we're demonstrating our design and industrialization capabilities plus the ability to develop and deliver a powerful mass-production platform at an unprecedented scale," said James Peng, co-founder and CEO of Pony.ai.

"This will help us realize our vision of bringing safe autonomous mobility solutions to all,” he said.

Pony.ai began co-developing Drive Orin-based systems with Nvidia in 2021, leveraging the high-performance SoC to accelerate the pace of Pony.ai's hardware development. It first adopted the Nvidia Drive platform in 2017.

Founded in 2016, Pony.ai was the first to conduct autonomous trucking tests on an open highway in China and is the only company with autonomous trucking permits in both Beijing and Guangzhou, Guangdong province.

It is also the first of two companies to be permitted to conduct driverless tests and charge fees for public robotaxi services in Beijing, along with permits to test autonomous vehicles in all of China's tier-1 cities.

Pony.ai has formed partnerships with leading carmakers including Toyota, FAW Group and GAC Group.