XPeng’s epic autonomous trip in China

The XPeng P7 is one of the vehicles undertaking an epic trip in China. Photo: XPeng

XPeng, China’s homegrown main competitor to Tesla, is on an epic 3600-kilometre autonomous driving trip from Guangzhou to Beijing in China, leaving on March 19 and arriving today.

Vehicles, including the P7 Premium version, are being driven by media using XPeng’s Navigation Guided Pilot (NGP) for 85 percent of the way.

XPeng is releasing daily statistics of the drive, including: Lane changing and overtaking success rate (86 percent), highway ramp entering and exiting success rate (85 percent), tunnel passing through success rate (91 percent).

Journalists get to chose their own route and XPeng’s own propriety self-driving software (as opposed to relying on outside suppliers) does the rest.

XPeng’s XPilot3.0 system has 5 Bosch 5th generation millimetre wave radars, 13 autonomous driving cameras, 12 ultrasonic sensors and NVIDIA Drive Xavier (NVIDIA’s most complex chip) and Snapdragon 820A (QUALCOMM’s best processor for cars).

XPeng’s P7 new luxury car has chalked up one million kilometres of testing with its autonomous driving systems. Given that XPeng is now on sale in Norway and Europe is next, Tesla is no doubt watching closely!