XPeng unveils extended-range and pure electric systems, and will launch the Robotaxi model for intelligent driving | Frontline

Text | Angela Li

Editor | Qin Li

On November 6 at the XPeng Auto AI Technology Day, the Chairman and CEO He Xiaopeng disclosed the XPeng Kunpeng Super Electric System for the first time, featuring the "One Car, Dual Energy" strategy. Among them, "Kun" represents the super range extender system, adopting the next-generation range extender technology; "Peng" represents XPeng's pure electric system that has been in place for a long time.

At the same time, XPeng also announced the progress in intelligence. The self-driving brand was officially upgraded to "XPeng Turing AI Autonomous Driving"; the self-developed intelligent driving chip made its debut, and in the future, it can support multiple application scenarios such as AI vehicles, AI robots, and flying cars. For the long term, XPeng is also developing the Ultra model for the Robotaxi field, with L4-level intelligent driving capabilities.

At the conference, He Xiaopeng stated directly that in the future, XPeng Auto aims to be a global AI automotive company.

In today's price competition in the automotive market, car companies need to clearly identify their advantages to ensure that their products hit the market successfully. The MONA series M03 model previously released by XPeng, with its eye-catching design, cost-effective pricing, and intelligent features, has achieved monthly sales of over 10,000 units.

However, as the competition environment becomes more intense, XPeng needs stronger products to pry the market. Introducing range extender models is one of XPeng's strategies.

In the communication session after the conference, He Xiaopeng said that he has been thinking about range extenders for many years. He believes that different technologies should be used to obtain different customer values. Pure electric vehicles still have deficiencies: in areas where the charging infrastructure is slow, pure electric vehicles may not be able to meet the needs of users; at the same time, the maximum range of pure electric vehicles is 800km, but if users want a range of over 1000km, a different energy method is still needed.

For this reason, XPeng has launched the Kunpeng Super Electric System. This system integrates XPeng's accumulation in the pure electric field: 800V high-voltage silicon carbide platform, 5C ultra-fast charging capability, and AI battery doctor, etc.

Based on these technologies, the pure electric range of XPeng's future range extender new vehicle reaches 430km, and the comprehensive range exceeds 1400km; at the same time, the 5C ultra-fast charging AI battery can achieve "1 km of charging in 1 second", and it can be charged to 80% in just 12 minutes. These capabilities make the usage experience of range extender vehicles infinitely close to the current usage experience of pure electric vehicles.

In addition, XPeng also released a new generation of hybrid silicon carbide coaxial electric drive, with the CLTC efficiency of the electric drive reaching 93.5%, and the volume being only one-third of the previous generation of electric drives, creating more space in the vehicle.

After launching the "One Car, Dual Energy" strategy, XPeng is also continuously expanding the charging system. Currently, XPeng has built 1641 self-operated charging stations nationwide, including 1307 supercharging stations. XPeng also plans to accelerate the construction of S5 supercharging stations in China and globally in 2025.

In terms of intelligence, XPeng's self-driving brand has been upgraded to the "Turing AI Autonomous Driving" system, covering the self-developed cloud and vehicle-end large models, AI chips and underlying architectures for large model development.

In the field of cloud large models, XPeng claims to use the same training framework as Open AI, and the parameter quantity is 80 times that of the vehicle-end large model. XPeng believes that by distilling the cloud large model, a vehicle-end large model with a higher upper limit can be obtained. This is the continuous evolution method of XPeng's end-to-end intelligent driving.

At the conference, He Xiaopeng also shared the latest progress of the intelligent driving chip: In October this year, the XPeng Turing AI chip has successfully run the latest version of the intelligent driving function. This chip is specially customized for large models and has a 40-core processor, which can support the operation of large models with up to 30B parameters.

In addition, XPeng has more designs for future L4 autonomous driving vehicles. For example, a vehicle underlying architecture - Canghai Base has been designed for autonomous driving vehicles, covering the core computing platform, basic software platform, and intelligent vehicle control application platform. For example, the total communication bandwidth of the vehicle can be increased by 33 times, and the image output speed of the camera can be increased by 12 times, while achieving L4-level safety redundancy.

In the long term, XPeng has been developing the "Ultra" model with the Robotaxi form. This vehicle will be equipped with multiple XPeng Turing AI chips and the XPeng Canghai Base, with a vehicle computing power of up to 3000TOPS and L4-level intelligent driving capabilities.

In terms of the cockpit, XPeng's Tianji AIOS system also plans to deploy a 10-billion-parameter large model locally to provide a more natural and seamless human-computer interaction.

With the support of both range extender and pure electric energy forms, XPeng has the opportunity to obtain a larger market share; and the constructed AI automotive system will also push XPeng's smart cars further.