XPeng
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XPeng Inc. (Chinese: 小鹏汽车; pinyin: Xiǎopéng Qìchē; legally Guangzhou Xiaopeng Motors Technology Co., Ltd.) is a Chinese designer and manufacturer of smart electric vehicles, autonomous driving software, AI silicon, humanoid robots and electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. The company is headquartered in Guangzhou, Guangdong, with research and engineering centres in Shanghai, Beijing, San Diego, and Mountain View. XPeng is dual-listed on the New York Stock Exchange (XPEV) and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (9868), and ranks among the most prominent of China's so-called "new force" automakers alongside NIO and Li Auto. [1][2]
Unlike many of its peers, XPeng has staked its identity on doing nearly every layer of the technology stack itself, from battery chemistry and electric drive units up through perception models, language models, in-house silicon, and the operating system that runs the cabin. By 2025 the company described itself less as an automaker than as an "AI Mobility Company" with three concrete physical-AI bets: smart cars built around the Tianji XOS operating system and the XNGP driver-assistance stack; the Iron humanoid robot family; and the Land Aircraft Carrier modular flying car developed by its subsidiary AeroHT (later rebranded Aridge). [3][4]
This article covers the parent company. For the dedicated robotics subsidiary, see XPENG Robotics. For individual products, see XPENG PX5 and XPeng IRON.
XPeng was founded in August 2014 in Guangzhou by Xia Heng (Henry Xia) and He Tao, two former senior engineers from GAC Group who had spent years inside one of China's largest state-owned automakers and wanted to try building a software-first electric car from scratch. The early team was small and unusually engineering-heavy, and it leaned on the reputation of its angel investor: He Xiaopeng, a serial internet entrepreneur best known for co-founding the mobile browser company UCWeb, which Alibaba had acquired in 2014 in what was at the time China's largest internet acquisition. He Xiaopeng put personal capital into the venture and lent his given name to the brand ("Xpeng" anglicises 小鹏, his nickname). [5][6]
For the first three years He Xiaopeng remained at Alibaba while the founding engineers built early prototypes. By August 2017 he formally left Alibaba, joined the company full-time as chairman, and set the direction that would define XPeng going forward: a vertically integrated EV maker that would write its own driver-assistance code rather than license it from a Tier 1 supplier. He has held the dual roles of Chairman and CEO since.
The first production model, the G3 compact SUV, was unveiled at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and entered Chinese customer deliveries in December 2018. The second model, the P7 electric sedan, debuted at Auto Shanghai in April 2019 and reached customers in June 2020. Both vehicles ran an early in-house driver-assistance system called XPILOT, putting XPeng ahead of most Chinese rivals on advanced driver assistance. [1]
On 27 August 2020, XPeng raised approximately US$1.5 billion in an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker XPEV; shares closed up more than 40 percent on the first day of trading. A secondary listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange followed in 2021 (ticker 9868), giving the company a dual-currency capital base at a time when several Chinese ADRs were under regulatory pressure in Washington. [1][7]
XPeng entered 2023 in difficulty after the disappointing launch of the G9 flagship SUV in late 2022, which suffered from a confusing trim ladder and forced a public price reset within days of going on sale. The company brought in former Great Wall Motor president Wang Fengying in early 2023 to overhaul sales channels and product planning. The reorganisation, combined with the rapid success of the G6 crossover and the MONA M03 mass-market sedan in 2024, drove a sharp recovery. [3][8]
As of early 2026, XPeng sold or had announced the following passenger models, all built on the Smart Electric Platform Architecture (SEPA) family. The MONA brand sits at the entry level, the core XPeng lineup occupies the mid-market, and Ultra trims of the newest products are positioned to receive Level 4 software when it is released.
| Model | Body style | Launched | Position | Notable technology |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MONA M03 | Compact sedan | August 2024 | Entry level (RMB 119,800 to 155,800) | Pure-vision XNGP, no LiDAR |
| P7+ | Mid-large sedan | November 2024 | Family sedan, Tesla Model 3 rival | First XPeng to drop LiDAR for pure vision |
| P7 (new generation) | Sport sedan | August 2025 | Performance flagship sedan | Turing AI chip, VLA architecture |
| G6 | Mid-size SUV | June 2023, refresh March 2025 | Crossover, Tesla Model Y rival | 800V SiC, 5C supercharging |
| G7 | Mid-size SUV | June 2025 | AI-first SUV | Three Turing chips, 2,250 TOPS |
| G9 | Large SUV | September 2022, refresh March 2025 | Family SUV flagship | XNGP, X-EEA 3.0 architecture |
| X9 | Six- or seven-seat MPV | January 2024 | Premium MPV | Rear-wheel steering, LiDAR XNGP |
| P5 | Compact sedan | 2021 | Budget sedan (legacy) | First production EV with twin LiDAR |
| ID. UNYX 07 (joint with VW) | Mid-size sedan | Mass production March 2026 | China-only, Volkswagen brand | Co-developed under VW partnership |
Delivery growth has been steep. XPeng delivered 190,068 vehicles in 2024 and reached the cumulative 800,000 vehicle milestone in mid-2025; the millionth vehicle came off the production line in November 2025. Full-year 2025 deliveries reached 429,445 units, an annual increase of roughly 126 percent. [4][9][10]
XPeng operates two wholly owned smart-manufacturing bases in China:
The Wuhan plant, originally announced in 2020, has not entered the same scale of production as the Guangdong sites. Combined annual installed capacity exceeded 400,000 units by the end of 2025.
XPeng's distinguishing claim has always been that it writes its driver-assistance stack end-to-end in-house. The company invested roughly RMB 3.5 billion (about US$485 million) in research and development in 2024 alone and grew the AI engineering team to more than 4,000 people. [3]
The first generation of the system, XPILOT 1.0, shipped on the G3 in 2018 and offered conventional adaptive cruise and lane keeping. XPILOT 3.0, released on the P7 in 2021, added China's first production Highway Navigation Guided Pilot (NGP), a feature comparable to Tesla's Navigate on Autopilot. XPILOT 3.5, launched on the LiDAR-equipped P5 sedan in 2021, extended NGP into city streets for the first time in a production vehicle, using a sensor stack of 32 sensors including 2 LiDAR units, 12 ultrasonic sensors, 5 millimeter-wave radars and 13 cameras. [12][13]
In 2023 the architecture was rebranded XNGP (XPilot Navigation Guided Pilot) and reorganised around a city-and-highway unified stack. By 2024 XPeng claimed XNGP coverage in every Chinese city with a navigable map, and the company began shipping vehicles configured for mapless operation, meaning the car would drive on roads it had never seen rather than relying on pre-built high-definition maps. [14]
In May 2024 XPeng announced what it described as China's first mass-produced end-to-end model for autonomous driving, unifying perception, planning and control into a small set of large neural networks rather than the traditional pipeline of hand-coded modules. The architecture has three named components:
| Component | Role | Description |
|---|---|---|
| XNet | Perception backbone | Combines dynamic XNet, static XNet, and a 2K pure-vision occupancy network covering more than two million 3D grid cells around the vehicle |
| XPlanner | Planning and control | Large neural model that produces driving trajectories directly from perception output |
| XBrain | Reasoning layer | Large language model for scene understanding, traffic-rule reading and unusual-event handling |
This stack is rolled out through the Tianji XOS operating system (天玑), launched as XOS 5.1.0 on 20 May 2024 and described by the company as the industry's first OS to apply AI to both the smart cockpit and the driver-assistance system simultaneously. The XOS 5.4 release on the P7+ in late 2024 added the pure-vision pipeline that allowed XPeng to remove LiDAR from its newer models. [15][16]
At its November 2025 AI Day in Guangzhou, XPeng unveiled VLA 2.0, a Vision-Language-Action model that the company says removes the explicit "language translation" middle step in the conventional V-L-A pipeline and produces driving actions directly from visual input. Key claimed metrics:
The company has named Volkswagen as the first commercial customer for VLA 2.0, the first time a major Western automaker has agreed to license a Chinese-developed driving stack for use in its own vehicles. [17][18]
XPeng has also announced three Robotaxi models for trial operation in 2026, all built on the same Turing-and-VLA hardware base, and described them as the first full-stack self-developed and mass-produced Robotaxis from a Chinese automaker. He Xiaopeng has stated publicly that the firm aims to deliver an L4-level autonomous driving experience in China by the end of 2025. [17]
The Turing chip is XPeng's in-house automotive AI accelerator, first detailed in November 2024 and shipping in customer cars in 2025. Each Turing die delivers approximately 750 TOPS of effective AI compute, which the company claims is roughly equivalent to three Nvidia Drive Orin X chips (each rated at about 254 TOPS). The chip integrates a 40-core CPU, two NPUs, and on-die memory sufficient to run a roughly 30-billion-parameter model locally. [19][20]
The Turing chip first shipped at scale on the XPeng G7 mid-size SUV launched on 11 June 2025, which was marketed as the world's first mass-produced "AI car" with L3-class on-board compute. The G7's Ultra trim carries three Turing chips for a combined 2,250 TOPS, the same configuration that powers the next-generation Iron robot. [20]
| Generation | Year | Vehicle introduced | Sensor stack | Compute | Highlight feature |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| XPILOT 1.0 | 2018 | G3 | Cameras and radar | Mobileye EyeQ4 | Adaptive cruise, lane keeping |
| XPILOT 3.0 | 2021 | P7 | 14 cameras, 5 radars, 12 ultrasonic | Nvidia Xavier | Highway NGP |
| XPILOT 3.5 | 2021 | P5 | Adds 2x LiDAR | Nvidia Xavier | First production city NGP |
| XPILOT 4.0 / XNGP | 2023 | G9, G6 | LiDAR plus camera | 2x Nvidia Orin (508 TOPS) | City NGP nationwide |
| XNGP end-to-end | 2024 | P7+ | Pure vision (no LiDAR) | 2x Orin | Mapless XNet plus XPlanner plus XBrain |
| VLA 1.0 | 2025 | G7 | Pure vision | 1 to 3 Turing chips | Vision-Language-Action driving |
| VLA 2.0 | 2026 | P7 (new), G7 Ultra, X9 EREV | Pure vision | 3 Turing chips, 2,250 TOPS | Direct vision-to-action, L4 target |
XPeng's humanoid robotics work is conducted by XPENG Robotics, an internal division formally announced as a subsidiary in 2020 and now central to the company's "physical AI" strategy. The robotics group benefits from sharing perception models, training data infrastructure and Turing silicon with the automotive division, an integration that XPeng frequently cites as a structural advantage over pure-play robotics startups.
The XPENG PX5 bipedal robot was unveiled at the company's annual 1024 Tech Day on 24 October 2023 and updated through 2024. PX5 stands 1.5 metres tall, weighs 109 kg and has 22 degrees of freedom across the body, with each arm carrying 7 DOF and each hand carrying 11 DOF. The hands feature a rigid-soft hybrid drive that allows the robot to grip objects of varying shape; the arms have a load-to-self-weight ratio over 0.6 and a 0.05 mm repeated positioning accuracy. PX5 was demonstrated walking continuously for more than two hours over indoor and outdoor terrain, including stairs and uneven ground. The platform was earmarked for factory patrol, parts delivery and retail-store demonstration roles. [21]
At its 2024 AI Day in November of that year, XPeng unveiled Iron (internal designation X20), a much more advanced humanoid that the company began deploying inside its own Guangzhou production lines almost immediately. The first-generation Iron stood 178 cm tall, weighed 70 kg, and reportedly had 60 joints driving 200 degrees of freedom across the full body, with 22-DOF dexterous hands and a "Eagle Eye" 720-degree vision system. [22]
A refreshed Iron was unveiled at the 2025 XPENG AI Day on 5 November 2025 in Guangzhou and immediately attracted global attention. Its movement was so fluid in its stage demonstration that online viewers accused XPeng of hiding a person inside the suit, prompting the company to slice the robot's leg open on stage to expose the actuators and wiring. Specifications of the second-generation Iron include: [23][24]
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| Height | 178 cm |
| Weight | 70 kg |
| Degrees of freedom | 82 (22 per hand) |
| AI compute | 3 Turing chips, 2,250 TOPS combined |
| Battery | All-solid-state pack |
| Reasoning model | VLT (Vision-Language-Task) trinity model |
| Skin | Full-body soft skin with embedded touch sensors |
| Body options | Male and female physiques offered |
| Production target | End of 2026 (mass production) |
XPeng partnered with Chinese steel producer Baoshan Iron and Steel (Baosteel) to deploy Iron in industrial inspection workflows, and the company stated that Iron will eventually move into retail stores, sales offices and home environments. The robot was the first humanoid that XPeng publicly stated had been engineered to automotive-grade reliability and quality standards. [25]
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2020 | XPENG Robotics formed as a subsidiary |
| 2021 | Acquisition of robotics startup Dogotix; quadruped robot "Xiaobai Long" released |
| 2023 | PX5 bipedal humanoid revealed at 1024 Tech Day |
| 2024 (Oct) | PX5 production status announced; refined dexterous hands shown |
| 2024 (Nov) | First-generation Iron (X20) humanoid unveiled at AI Day; factory deployment begins |
| 2025 (Nov) | Next-generation Iron unveiled with all-solid-state battery and VLT model |
| 2026 (Jan) | XPeng announces first robot prototype built to automotive standards |
| 2026 (target) | Mass production of Iron at end of year |
XPeng's eVTOL subsidiary, originally named XPeng AeroHT and rebranded Aridge in October 2025, develops modular and integrated flying vehicles. The flagship product is the Land Aircraft Carrier, a six-wheeled extended-range electric "mothership" minivan that carries a folding two-seat eVTOL aircraft in its rear cargo bay. Specifications of the Land Aircraft Carrier system: [26][27]
The Civil Aviation Administration of China accepted the type-certification application for the X3-F air module in March 2024, and certification work entered the compliance-confirmation phase in 2025. AeroHT also raised a Series B round of approximately US$250 million in mid-2025 to fund production scale-up. [28]
In July 2023, Volkswagen Group invested US$700 million in XPeng for a 4.99 percent stake and entered a multi-year framework agreement to co-develop two electric vehicles for the Chinese market under Volkswagen brands. [29][30]
The partnership has expanded several times since:
In August 2023, XPeng signed an agreement to acquire the smart-EV development assets of ride-hailing operator DiDi Global for up to HK$5.835 billion (about US$744 million), paid primarily in newly issued Class A ordinary shares representing about 3.25 percent of XPeng's enlarged share capital. The deal transferred DiDi's intellectual property, technology and EV manufacturing and R&D units to XPeng and seeded the new mass-market MONA brand, whose first product, the MONA M03, launched on 27 August 2024 and exceeded 166,000 cumulative deliveries within its first 12 months. DiDi can earn additional incentive shares of up to 5 percent of XPeng's equity if MONA reaches 180,000 unit annual sales for two consecutive years. [32][33]
Alibaba was an early outside investor and remains a significant shareholder. Other backers have included Xiaomi, IDG Capital, Morningside, Sequoia China and Guangzhou municipal vehicles. He Xiaopeng remains the largest individual shareholder.
XPeng has not yet posted full-year profitability but its trajectory through 2024 and 2025 narrowed losses sharply while revenue and unit volumes climbed. Selected reported figures: [4][8][9]
| Fiscal year | Vehicle deliveries | Total revenue (RMB bn) | Net loss (RMB bn) | Gross margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 120,757 | 26.86 | (9.14) | 11.5% |
| 2023 | 141,601 | 30.68 | (10.38) | 1.5% |
| 2024 | 190,068 | 40.87 | (5.79) | 14.3% |
| 2025 | 429,445 | 76.72 | (1.14) | 16.7% (approx.) |
In the fourth quarter of 2025, XPeng reported its first ever quarterly net profit, of approximately RMB 380 million, on revenues of RMB 22.25 billion. Overseas deliveries reached 45,008 units in 2025, nearly doubling year-on-year and accounting for more than 15 percent of total revenue. The company has guided for half of total sales to come from outside China by the end of 2030 and has set a 2030 target of one million annual overseas vehicles. [9][10]
XPeng began exporting in 2020 with its first overseas market in Norway. By the end of 2025 the company operated in more than 30 markets worldwide, including 28 European countries, with the European retail footprint exceeding 290 outlets. [34][35]
Markets entered include the Nordic region, Western Europe (Germany, Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Austria, UK, Italy, Spain, Portugal), Central and Eastern Europe (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia), the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand. The European go-to-market mix combines directly operated stores in Denmark, dealer-owned sales companies in Germany and France, and import-distributor partnerships elsewhere. The company has stated it intends to begin local European production within the decade. [34]
Within China, XPeng competes most directly with Tesla's China business and the other "new force" automakers such as NIO, Li Auto and Leapmotor, as well as the broader market leaders BYD and Geely. XPeng tends to position itself as the most software-forward of the new forces, with a heavier engineering bias and a faster cadence of releases for its driver-assistance system than its peers. The company's 2025 announcement that it would supply VLA 2.0 to Volkswagen and operate its own autonomous vehicle Robotaxi service marks a clear departure from the pure consumer-EV business model.
In humanoid robotics XPeng competes with Tesla's Optimus programme, Figure AI, 1X, Sanctuary AI, Boston Dynamics, Unitree, Agility Robotics and the broader cohort of new humanoid startups inside China AI ecosystems such as Unitree, UBTECH and Fourier. XPeng's structural advantages here are vertical integration with its own Turing silicon, the ability to use its automotive supply chain for joints, batteries and casting, and access to large amounts of real-world driving and factory data for training perception models.
He Xiaopeng remains chairman and CEO. Co-founder Xia Heng serves as president of the company and oversees product engineering, while He Tao is the chief technology officer. Wang Fengying joined as company president in 2023 and led the sales-and-channel restructuring credited with the 2024 to 2025 turnaround. The company holds an annual technology event on 24 October ("1024 Tech Day", a wordplay on the binary kilo) and an annual AI Day in November where it announces software architecture and robotics roadmaps.
XPeng is recognised as one of the most engineering-driven of the Chinese automakers; its 2024 listing on Fortune China's "Tech 50" and "China 500" rankings reflected this positioning. The company invested approximately RMB 3.5 billion in R&D in 2024 and was on track to invest at a higher rate in 2025 as the Turing chip entered production. [3][4]