EVwire brief: XPeng CEO He Xiaopeng took the company's first internal Robotaxi ride this week, hailing the vehicle himself right outside XPeng's headquarters.
It's the first time XPeng has fully connected its online booking flow to an actual offline ride, and it comes eight months after the company first unveiled its Robotaxi plans, faster than even He expected. The CEO described the rapid progress of Xpeng’s robotaxi program in a LinkedIn post:
"We announced the Robotaxi plan last November, kicked off public-road testing this January, rolled out production vehicles in May, and now, just eight months later, we've run the whole loop and started internal trials. That's faster than we ever expected."
Xiaopeng is already looking past this first ride, toward opening the service up to everyone. And as far as first tests go, the CEO stated that he would give the company’s vision-based robotaxi service a 10/10 rating.
"I'm really looking forward to the day when our internal users, locals in Guangzhou, and travelers visiting the city can all pull out their phones, hail a XPENG Robotaxi, and hop in for a ride. And for this first taste of Robotaxi? I give it a solid 10/10!"
Details:
He Xiaopeng posted a ride-along video alongside his announcement. Here's what it shows, screenshot by screenshot:
Calling the car: The test began with the CEO requesting a ride through Xpeng's robotaxi app before the vehicle autonomously arrives outside the company's headquarters.
The CEO and his team order the Robotaxi through XPeng's own app.
Pre-cooling the cabin: The app lets riders set the temperature before they even get in, which is pretty handy.
Users are allowed to control their GX robotaxis’ temperature in advance.
Starting the trip: Getting moving requires a swipe to confirm on the GX robotaxi’s ceiling-mounted screen.
The GX’s large second row display allows for easy engagement from the user.
Voice-activated fragrance: Once moving, the cabin runs on voice commands to XPeng's AI assistant.
Fragrance-on-demand is a feature that some passengers may not know they needed.
In-car movies: The center screen doubles as an entertainment display supporting platforms like iQIYI, China's answer to Netflix.
That large display really starts to shine in the roboatxi service’s video-on-demand feature.
Mid-ride destination changes: A passenger can change the destination straight from the app, because waypoints are built into the service.
Waypoints. Every robotaxi user loves waypoints.
Wrapping up: On arrival, the second row display reminds riders to grab their things and shut the door behind them, with a tap-through option for more.
Tapping a button on the display ends the ride.
*Future Feature - Remote verification: In one part of the video, it was mentioned that Xpeng’s robotaxis could eventually recognize its passengers by visual cues. That’s a good use of end-to-end AI as any.
This is, of course, an upcoming feature. But it’s impressive nonetheless.
Context:
XPeng’s robotaxi service is built on the company’s GX platform with four in-house Turing AI chips for a combined 3,000 TOPS of onboard compute, engineered to Level 4 autonomy.
Similar to Tesla in the United States, Xpeng’s autonomous driving efforts also use a Vision-based system using cameras and its VLA 2.0 (Vision-Language-Action) end-to-end AI large model.
XPeng is targeting pilot rides for outside users in the second half of this year, with fully driverless operation planned for early 2027.
Source: He Xiaopeng on LinkedIn
DIG DEEPER into Chinese EV industry news with our dedicated EVwire coverage. And don't forget to subscribe to our EV industry newsletter to join 14,000+ EV geeks.
