Autonomous Driving Companies Target Freight Market as Passenger Tech Scales Down

On November 2, 2026, Zhuoyu announced that it had recently signed with partners on the Langke Technology smart logistics vehicle headquarters project, with a plan for total leasing, sales, and operations of unmanned vehicles to exceed 3,000 units in 2027. Before that announcement, truck autonomous driving had already seen cross-vehicle entrants reach production: in June this year, the first Shaanxi Heavy Duty Truck heavy-duty truck equipped with Zhuoyu's assisted-driving solution entered production; on October 29, the first batch of the T9, an L4 autonomous heavy-duty truck from a Pony.ai and GAC Lingcheng collaboration, rolled off the line. According to the report, the two product routes differ, but both bring capabilities already used on other vehicle types into trucks. Hardware costs have come down, and passenger-vehicle models together with software and hardware are being reused on heavy-duty trucks, lowering the R&D and production thresholds for freight autonomous driving. As a result, companies that previously focused only on freight now face competitors able to develop and supply across vehicle categories. The report also notes that Zhuoyu's Panxing assisted-driving solution PDS 4, already in production, uses the high-perception large model 4.0 or above.