Shanghai (Gasgoo)- KargoBot.ai and Horizon Robotics announced a broad strategic alliance at the Horizon Together 2025, marking a new push to commercialize Level-4 autonomous trucking in China. The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding outlining plans to accelerate the deployment of next-generation driverless heavy-duty trucks and expand the technology's commercial footprint.
China's autonomous freight sector has moved past its early validation phase and is expected to enter large-scale expansion in 2025. With road-freight spending topping 7.5 trillion yuan, automation is seen as a critical lever for lowering logistics costs and improving efficiency nationwide. Analysts project that by 2035, driverless heavy-truck penetration could exceed 50%. Against this backdrop, the partnership aims to combine both companies' technical strengths and ecosystems to speed up mass deployment of autonomous freight operations.
The collaboration brings together Horizon Robotics' experience in mass-produced passenger-vehicle ADAS and KargoBot's accumulated expertise in L4 autonomous freight operations. The companies plan to merge data across urban roads, expressways, and long-haul corridors, integrating it with KargoBot's proprietary MMLA architecture and world-model technology. This combined system is expected to enhance fleet-level intelligence, single-vehicle autonomy, and complex convoy operations, laying the groundwork for a more capable large-scale AI model tailored for freight transport.
KargoBot will adopt Horizon Robotics'Journey® 6P computing platform to localize and optimize the hardware powering its L4 autonomous-driving systems. The company has already reduced the hardware cost per vehicle to around 90,000 yuan—one of the lowest in the industry—while simultaneously improving overall system performance through tighter supply-chain integration and engineering refinements.
Building on KargoBot's existing L4 freight platform, the joint effort will incorporate Horizon Robotics' advanced driver-assistance expertise, cost-efficient vision-only perception, and proven engineering toolchain. The companies say these additions will raise the system's performance ceiling and move the industry closer to a truly deployable "AI truck driver" capable of safe, scalable, real-world operations.
At Auto Shanghai 2025, the two companies are set to unveil "KargoBot Space," a next-generation transport robot billed as the world's first of its kind. The machine will run on Horizon Robotics' Journey® computing family, and the partners are co-developing domain controllers suited for higher-level autonomy. Horizon Robotics' newest Journey® 6P platform delivers high compute capacity and a heterogeneous multi-core design, supporting full-stack autonomous-driving computation with strong energy efficiency and low latency.
KargoBot said it had already completed its end-to-end "door-to-door" autonomous freight loop and is now preparing for scaled rollout. The new transport robot is slated for mass production and pilot operations in the first half of 2026. Using Horizon Robotics' computing platform, KargoBot aims to speed up industrialization and lay the foundation for large-scale commercial driverless logistics.
The companies also plan to deepen cooperation across mass-production deployment, customer operations, and scenario expansion. Leveraging their respective ecosystems, they aim to move from mutual enablement toward establishing a shared technological foundation for the broader freight-transport industry—accelerating adoption of autonomous-driving technologies and helping reduce logistics costs across society.
