Shanghai (Gasgoo)- GAC NIO, a joint venture between GAC Group and NIO, announced on Sept. 16 its partnership formed with several Chinese self-driving startups, mobility service providers and equity investment firms, signaling a substantial headway it aims to make in building a closed-loop intelligent mobility ecosystem that integrates both software and hardware.

(GAC NIO's first mass-produced model "Hycan 007; photo source: Hycan)

The partners include PKU Jinqiu New Technologies Limited. (PKU Jinqiu), Horizon Robotics, WeRide, eHi Car Services and Xinding Capital.

The cooperation was unveiled at a summit themed intelligent mobility ecosystem held by GAC NIO in Beijing. Meanwhile, the automaker announced a fund it jointly initiated with Xinding Capital. Involving an initial size of $1 billion, the fund is set up to provide continuous capital support and cooperation resources to intelligent mobility ecosystem.

In addition, GAC NIO said it plan to team up with PKU Jinqiu, a technology company backed by Peking University, on founding an intelligent automobile institute, which will be dedicated to researching forward-looking trends for intelligent mobility ecosystem.

The automaker said its intelligent mobility ecosystem takes the high-quality hardware as the carrier, the AI-enabled operating system as the soul and the abundancy in ecosystem service as the core value.

Under the partnership agreement, PKU Jinqiu will do the forward-looking research on industrial trends for the intelligent mobility ecosystem, Horizon Robotics will offer support in computing capability using on-board chips, WeRide's autonomous driving technology will endow users with innovative travelling experience, and eHi Car Services will afford scenarios for the popularization of GAC NIO's vehicles, and collect and integrate driving data.

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