Plus.ai announces joint venture with China’s largest truck manufacturer

Founded in 2016 by a group of Stanford classmates, Plus.ai is one of a handful of autonomous trucking startups seeking to automate long-haul trucking. The company has operations in California and China, and has been testing vehicles in both countries.

News of the joint venture comes a few weeks after reports circulated that the Sequoia Capital-backed Plus.ai is raising $200 million to help bankroll its expansion.

In a conversation with FreightWaves that took place in late August, Kerrigan touted the company’s “diversified set of top-tier investors,” along with the company’s strategy of building tight partnerships up and down the value chain.  

In addition to its business relationship with FAW, Plus.ai claims as a partner Softbank- and Google-backed FullTruck Alliance, a Chinese freight-matching platform that controls 80% of the country’s trucking market.

“Between those two we have a very strong position in the Chinese market,” Kerrigan said. “We’re applying that same strategy to the U.S. On the upstream side, we’re working with major original equipment manufacturers, and on the downstream side, we’re running freight pilots with fleets.”  

Kerrigan declined to identify Plus.ai’s domestic partners, saying only the company has tested extensively in the U.S. and China, where an estimated 6.1 trillion metric ton-kilometers of freight are moved by a fleet of more than 5 million heavy-duty trucks.

Built on Plus.ai’s L4 full-stack autonomous driving technology, the FAW J7 L2 offers safety improvements and fuel optimization. Key benefits include the ability to automate driving activities to reduce human error and driver fatigue.