On July 30, 2024, XPeng Motors held the AI Intelligent Driving Technology Conference the event in Guangzhou and believes that AI will drive four major trends as it enters 30 new countries.
Chairman and CEO He Xiaopeng made some key announcements, including significant progress to XNGP self-driving capabilities with the AI Tianji XOS 5.2.0, an AI-powered in-car operating system. The OS is now released to users in China and will be pushed to global markets on August 15.
XOS 5.2.0 update brings 484 functional upgrades, 72 of which are new functions, focusing on three core modules: XNGP, iPhone connectivity, and personalized intelligent cockpit.
ADVERTISEMENT
By end of Q4, XPeng aims to achieve a comprehensive door-to-door autonomous driving experience by integrating ETC (electronic toll collection) for a seamless toll fee payment, highways, city restrictions, parking lots, and campus internal routes.
He Xiaopeng also announced that the first model from the Volkswagen joint development program will be mass-produced within the next 24 months on the electrical and electronic (E/E) architecture technology.
Global Expansion to 30 Countries
Based on the above chart, we can see that XPeng has been accelerating its global expansion strategy with export volume rising every month in 2024, from 398 to 1,840 units.
Note that export numbers are typically based vehicles sent to offshore directly operated stores or dealerships that have yet been sold to end customers. Export volume should be referred to as a lagging indicator of actual sales.
Towards the end of last year, reports have suggested that XPeng was gradually replacing its directly operated stores with the traditional dealership model to increase operational efficiency.
ADVERTISEMENT
XPeng currently sells its electric vehicles in Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. At the event, He Xiaopeng announced that they will be entering 30 more countries.
He Xiaopeng added that among Chinese EV brands priced above EUR 40,000, XPeng ranks first in export volume and the XPeng G9, priced between EUR 40,000 - 80,000, is the best-selling pure EV in Northern Europe and the Middle East.
The XPeng G6 will start global delivery in August and has already sold 500 units in 10 days in Israel in July. In the next few months, the G6 and G9 will begin sales in many major markets, including the UK, France, Australia, and Singapore.
AI to Drive these Four Technology Trends
He Xiaopeng believes that four technology trends will dictate the near future: chips, large models, autonomous driving, and robotics.
Toyota started research and development on autonomous driving in 1999, Google followed in 2009, Baidu in 2013, and XPeng Motors in 2014. August will mark XPeng's tenth year anniversary and he believes that the major turning point in autonomous driving is the advent of large models at the end of last year and early this year.
ADVERTISEMENT
XPeng spent 6 years commercializing autonomous driving on highways, 42 months to achieve nationwide coverage, and the company's next goal is to reach "door-to-door" autonomous driving within the next 4 months.
In 2024 alone, XPeng invested over CNY 3.5 billion and boasts one of the largest AI computing power reserves of 2.51 EFLOPS.
End-to-end Neural Networks
XPeng began development of their end-to-end large models for smart driving last year and He Xiaopeng expects major advancements soon. The company's AI model includes the neural network XNet, the planning and control large model XPlanner, and the large language model XBrain.
He Xiaopeng mentioned that end-to-end models brought immense changes. For one, data that once was a cornerstone of AI, has become obsolete. The underlying rules and logic of end-to-end architecture requires new approaches.
ADVERTISEMENT
XPeng's founder visited the United States earlier this year and tested Tesla's FSD V12.3.6 and was very impressed by the improvement. In fact, since version 12, FSD has been handled by end-to-end neural networks, which learn the task of autonomous driving based on raw sensor inputs.
However, with the release of FSD V12.5, He Xiaopeng shared his thoughts on Weibo that an end-to-end approach is best only to reach L2 or L3 autonomy, but solving L4 requires that end-to-end model to be paired with a large model.
While the two approaches are based on transformers, they differ in that Tesla aims to integrate all aspects of autonomy into a single neural network, while XPeng uses a "hybrid" approach to improve the performance of the end-to-end model with bespoke large models to adapt to diverse driving situations.
Nationwide Coverage: 2,595 cities and 7.56 million km
XPeng pushes new XNGP iterations every two days based on extensive testing nationwide, having covered over 2,595 cities and 7.56 million kilometers of road so far.
XNGP is serious about achieving full nationwide capabilities. The staff tested routes across China from Guangzhou (South East) to Urumqi (North West) to Harbing (North East) without using highways and confirmed that 99% of the routes supported XNGP's self-driving.
ADVERTISEMENT
As the company is cognisant that marketing depends on car owners sharing their driving experience, XPeng added a feature that enables automatically generated video highlights of self-driving moments. According to internal data collected, 80% of drivers are satisfied with their autonomous driving capabilities at present.
Self-driving is enabled on small roads in villages and alleys even without HD maps and can adapt to the complex road conditions of China. For example, China has over 300 million e-bikes on the roads, partly due to the popularity of food delivery, and thousands of types of traffic lights bespoke to different regions and city tiers.
Mona M03: “outperforms any cars over CNY 200k”
The much anticipated mass-market AI pure electric sedan XPeng Mona M03 will arrive in stores in 100 cities across China on August 1st.
Later that month, XPeng will hold an official launch event and release the final retail price, which will be below CNY 200,000.
He Xiaopeng said that after driving the Mona for over 2 hours on various road conditions, he believes that it outperforms any other cars priced over CNY 200,000 he has driven.
S5 Superchargers: 1 km/s charging speed
XPeng currently operates 1,300 supercharging stations, including 1,000 superfast charging stations.
In July, XPeng released S5 superchargers, which are capable of 5C charging at a speed of over 1 km per second. In other words, users can charge 300 km in only 5 minutes.