Chinese automaker Dongfeng Automobile Company Ltd has launched a new brand for its newly-established autonomous logistics vehicle division, as it unveiled a new range of driverless goods vehicles earlier this month at an event held in Xiangyang, Hubei Province. The automaker’s purposely-designed, battery-powered autonomous goods vehicles, developed in partnership with local technology company Zelos (Suzhou) Intelligent Technology Company, will be sold under the Dongfeng OpenVan brand.
Dongfeng claims that its OpenVan vehicles are the first urban autonomous cargo vehicle series to be launched by a commercial vehicle manufacturer in China, as the company looks to position itself as a global leader in autonomous last-mile urban logistics vehicles, including delivery and municipal/sanitation vehicles.
The OpenVan range unveiled by Dongfeng comprises the DF-2 model, which has a cargo volume of 2 cubic metres, a maximum payload of 1 tonne, and a driving range of 120 km. The DF-8 model has 8 cubic metres of cargo space, a payload of 2.8 tonnes, and a range of almost 200 km, making it suitable for urban retail distribution. Larger models were also on display, including the 4.2-metre DF-60, with a maximum cargo volume of 60 cubic metres and of a payload capacity of 14 tonnes.
The jointly developed OpenVan platform features an AI-based Level 4 autonomous driving system developed by Zelos with a computing capability of over 500 trillion operations per second (TOPS).
Zelos claims to have delivered more than 25,000 autonomous vehicles to date, which operate in more than 20 countries and 300 cities, with more than 130 million km of cumulative Level 4 commercial driving data supporting its continuous AI development. The company claims to have accumulated 130 million km of operational validation on the platform, including in complex urban environments to test the system’s millisecond-level response capabilities. The vehicles have a fully redundant steer-by-wire chassis system and backup systems for braking, steering, and power supply functions.
