Xpeng Motors, one of the leading Chinese electric vehicle (EV) automakers, just announced impressive vehicle delivery results. December saw record monthly deliveries of 5700 vehicles, a 326% increase year-over-year, and a 35% increase month-over-month. The total number consisted of a record 3691 for the P7, the company’s latest product a sports sedan, and 2009 units for the G3 compact SUV. The Q4 2020 numbers included record deliveries of 12,964 vehicles, a 303% increase year-over-year, and a 51% increase from 3Q 2020. For all of 2020, the company delivered 27,041 vehicles, a 112% increase year-over-year.
The company attributes the record results to its increasing brand awareness and expanded sales, marketing, and supercharging service initiatives across China. The self-described smart electric vehicle company markets EVs that appeal to the large and growing base of technology-savvy middle-class consumers in China. It is one of a number of new Chinese OEMs, including Nio and Li Auto, going after a similar market.
Xpeng says its mission is to drive Smart EV transformation with technology and data, shaping the mobility experience of the future and optimizing its customers’ mobility experience. That mission is being led by key leaders including Xiaopeng He, Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO; Heng Xia, Co-founder, Director, and President; Brian Gu, Vice Chairman & President; and Tao He, Co-founder, Director, and Senior Vice President. The company emphasizes that it develops in-house its full-stack autonomous driving technology and in-car intelligent operating system as well as core vehicle systems including powertrain and the electrification/electronic architecture.
The company’s strategy, business model, and long-term prospects are getting support from the investor community. The company completed its Series C+ round financing in August, with $900 million coming from Alibaba, Aspex, Coatue, Hillhouse, Sequoia China, QIA, and Mubadala. It had announced a Series C funding round of $400 million in November 2019.
Despite the impacts of Covid-19, Xpeng reached several milestones in 2020 including securing the production license for its self-built fully owned factory in Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province, China, in May, and arguably what took the company to a higher level in launching its P7 in April.
P7, a game-changer for the company
The company started delivery of the P7, which it calls a super-long range, high-performance, smart EV sports sedan, in June after receiving an official production license in May from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology for its new factory. The Zhaoqing Xpeng Motors Intelligent Industrial Park, in the company’s home of Guangdong Province, is where the production of the P7 is ramping up to meet demand, with an annual capacity of 100,000 units.
“The customer delivery of our flagship P7 intelligent EV sports sedan—our second production model—is another testimony of our integrated capability, solidifying our position as a leading player in China’s smart EV market,” said He.
The delivery of the P7 represented a giant leap forward believes the company in realizing its ambition to create an end-to-end in-house intelligent manufacturing ecosystem and value chain—from homegrown R&D and IP creation, through design and development, to manufacturing and rollout, complemented by direct as well as authorized sales network, after-sales services, and customer support. Xpeng says that this positions it well ahead of the competition in the Chinese smart EV market. Nio and Li Auto might have something to say about that.
Company engineers designed and built the P7 with four goals in mind: drive further, charge quicker, accelerate faster, and control smoother. The sports sedan offers a combination of elegance, style, and comfort and a class-leading aerodynamic drag coefficient of 0.236.
While usually compared to Tesla’s Model 3, it falls between that model and Tesla’s larger Model S. The Xpeng is 4880 mm (192.1 in) long, 1896 mm (74.6 in) wide, and 1450 mm (57.1 in) tall on a 2998-mm (118.0-in) wheelbase. Mass ranges from 1865 to 2060 kg (4111 to 4541 lb).
Maximum output for the rear-wheel-drive model is 196 kW and 390 N·m (288 lb·ft), and the all-wheel-drive version is 316 kW (120 kW front and 196 kW rear) and 655 N·m (483 lb·ft).
At a maximum of 706 km (439 mi) by NEDC measurements, the company claims the standard rear-wheel-drive super-long-range version has the longest driving range among production EVs in China. It also says that the car’s home-grown 3-in-1 electric drive system has the most powerful permanent magnet synchronous motor on China’s EV market, with a maximum efficiency reaching 97.5%. The P7 is claimed to be the world’s first car to be equipped with an Infineon 950 IGBT (Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors) module, delivering up to 580 A to the motors for a continuous 40 s.
Xpeng collaborated with CATL (Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Ltd.) to develop the P7’s prismatic lithium NCM (nickel cobalt manganese) cells. As a result, the ultra-thin high-performance battery pack is only 110 mm (4.3 in) in height and reaches 170 W·h/kg energy density to deliver 80.9 kW·h of power.
The car’s chassis, with a front double-wishbone and rear five-linkage independent suspension, features a continuous damping control suspension developed with ZF. The Bosch/Brembo braking system has a new-generation Bosch iBooster for nearly 100% energy recovery and 35-m (115-ft) 100-0 km/h (62-0 mph) braking distance.
The sedan is built on Xpeng’s SEPA (Smart Electric Platform Architecture) with a comprehensive built-in neural network backed by a powerful dual-chip computing system and firmware OTA (over-the-air) updates to continually improve the user experience. The system adopts a 100-Mbit/s Ethernet central gateway, which is 200 times faster than a 500-Kbit/s high-speed CAN bus.
The P7 is the first production car to be powered by Nvidia‘s Drive AGX Xavier system-on-a-chip, delivering 30 TOPS (trillion operations per second), which is claimed to be 12 times more powerful than the chips in most competing brands while consuming only 30 W. Its Xmart OS 2.0 hardware uses Qualcomm’s top Snapdragon 820A vehicle processor, the most powerful in a production car.
“The P7’s evolving intelligence will set it apart from other products,” said He. “We are strongly committed in servicing our customers through regular OTA upgrades and quality services throughout the lifetime of their P7.”
Cutting-edge automated and smart features to come
In October, Xpeng gave more insight behind the company and its products, releasing its second Smart Car Operations Report after its second annual Tech Day, where the company provided a preview of its upcoming autonomous driving and in-car smart features.
At the event, Chairman He said that “2020 to 2022 is a period of significant momentum for the Smart EV sector, which will rapidly accelerate from 2023 to 2025 and a create massive disruption to traditional ICE vehicles. End-to-end R&D, data-driven capabilities, and fast growth are three initiatives needed for a company to gain long-term competitive advantages and dominant market share.”
At its Tech Day, XPeng launched 18 firmware OTA (over-the-air) updates, adding 82 new features to its vehicles. The company also announced in its 2020 Smart Car Operations Report that the average monthly utilization rate of its cars’ voice assistant had reached 99.74% and the in-car navigation utilization rate achieved 92.54%.
The new features announced address some of the major challenges for drivers in China.
XPeng’s autonomous driving system called XPilot 3.0, planned for release in the first quarter of 2021, will provide Navigation Guided Pilot (NGP) for highways and memory auto parking for car parks. The company says that the NGP solution, to be available on all of China’s major highways with high-precision digital maps, will be the most advanced navigation guided autonomous driving system for production models in China. It incorporates driving scenarios specific to China such as traffic cone recognition and avoidance, large-truck avoidance, night overtaking reminders, faulty vehicle avoidance, and vehicle following on congested roads.
The solution is said to also handle adverse weather conditions, complex roads, and locations without GPS signals. The company promises that it will be the only 360° dual-perception system in the industry, with optimal identification of automobile surroundings with the most powerful positioning capabilities in production.
The Memory Parking feature will recognize side-front parking spaces and cover “the last mile” of parking, with the ability to avoid obstacles, plan routes, and park with extreme precision. The feature is the world’s first auto parking system for production vehicles that does not require any car park modifications, claims the company.
“Our core competitive advantage is our end-to-end in-house developed software for autonomous driving,” said XinZhou Wu, Vice President of Autonomous Driving at XPeng. “In the past few years, we have developed a full range of self-developed R&D and implemented these advanced technologies into our models. There are only two automakers in the world that have end-to-end autonomous driving capabilities, and XPeng is one of them.”
XPeng also introduced updates of its Xmart OS operating system, with a number of claimed world’s firsts. It enables the world’s first all-voice in-car system able to deliver the majority of in-car functionalities; the world’s first open vehicle hardware system that allows third-party applications to access vehicle status and data to produce tailor-made infotainment; and the world’s first system that responds to continuous driver-vehicle dialogues and is able to execute 10 voice commands every 25 s.
“Driver-vehicle interaction technology has evolved from physical buttons to touch screens, to today’s voice commands,” said Ji Yu, Vice President of Internet at XPeng.
Continuous improvement, accelerated
At the 2020 Auto Guangzhou show in November, Xpeng unveiled the limited-edition P7 Wing. The new flagship model is designed to maximize the sporty and dynamic style of the car with a pair of scissor-style front doors ala Lamborghini. The limited-edition is available in four-wheel-drive high-performance and rear-wheel-drive super-long-range versions at post-subsidy prices of RMB 409,000 and RMB 366,900, respectively, for the Chinese market.
Customers can personalize the opening angle of the doors. Two obstacle-avoidance radars are installed on the left and right sides, which automatically identify obstacles and control the door movements during the opening process. The electric scissor-style doors can be unlocked in multiple ways—by car key, Bluetooth/NFC digital key, mobile phone app, control panel, or in-car voice assistant.
While the P7 Wing provided the show flash, it was the next-generation autonomous driving architecture detailed at Auto Guangzhou that was more important. It features significantly upgraded software and hardware systems for 2021 production models. Along with the new systems, the company will be one of the first automakers to adopt LiDAR (laser imaging, detection, and ranging) sensing, significantly improving the vehicle’s high-precision object recognition performance.
“Introducing LiDAR technology into production vehicles is a breakthrough in popularizing autonomous driving, and an endorsement of our in-house R&D process,” said He. “Our customers will benefit from this premium advanced technology, which makes autonomous driving more driver-friendly, safe, and effective.”
The new Xpeng hardware architecture is a combination of high-definition cameras, millimeter-wave radars, ultrasonic sensors, LiDAR, high-precision positioning, and mapping systems—all powered by a high-performance computing platform. With a total of 32 sensors, the system provides strong redundancy to deliver enhanced safety protection. It will also cover more usage scenarios, effectively enabling low-speed NGP functions for city driving.
The software architecture is based on a full-stack of in-house-developed technologies, including modules for perception, behavior planning, behavior/motion prediction, and map fusion—forming a closed loop of data and algorithms to support rapid functional iteration.
Among the major enhancements to the architecture are an enhanced integrated control unit, improved high-precision positioning, enhanced perception fusion, and increased computing power.
The XPU autonomous driving intelligent control unit integrates vehicle control and parking functions, making decision-making and execution more efficient. At the same time, by streamlining the number of controllers and wiring harnesses, the weight of the system is reduced.
The real-time kinematic (RTK) terminal is upgraded from 4G to 5G, supporting precise positioning with high-precision maps for high-speed and urban roads. A new positioning scheme, with IMU, GNSS, RTK (5G), and high-precision maps, for both highways and city roads is adopted to achieve centimeter-level accuracy. With latency reduced to milliseconds and driving scenario coverage rate over 97.5%, the setup covers a much wider range of terrain, high-rise building, and underground parking-lot occlusion scenarios.
The addition of LiDAR technology significantly improves the accuracy of horizontal and vertical position identification and provides a spatial resolution of less than 0.1°. Through the LiDAR’s data fusion with vision, millimeter-wave radar, and ultrasonic sensors, the system’s performance in target detection and measurement resolution is significantly improved even in scenarios without sufficient lighting.
The high-performance computing platform is designed with the capacity to further increase computing power, supporting the implementation of even higher-level autonomous driving functions. The company promises significant upgrades from 30 TOPS to over 200 TOPS in the near future.
The resulting autonomous driving architecture will achieve an advanced level of navigation-guided autonomous driving, with a wide coverage of different road conditions, low manual takeover rates, and longer continuous autonomous driving times. The new system also covers multiple weather conditions and situations for city and highway driving, including urban congestion, expressways, underground parking lots, toll gates, tunnels, and night driving conditions.
LiDAR technology from Livox
On the last day of 2020, Xpeng revealed Livox Technology Co. Ltd. as its first supplier of automotive-grade LiDAR technology for a 2021 production model. For Xpeng, the supplier has customized the automotive-grade version of its Horizon sensor, confusingly called Horiz, to deliver cost efficiency and reliability for production models.
Livox, an independent company founded in 2016 through DJI‘s Open Innovation Program, has been looking to revolutionize the LiDAR industry by providing sensors that offer better performance at a fraction of the cost of traditional units. The company wants to transform innovations in autonomous driving, smart cities, mapping, and mobile robotics by making lidar far easier and affordable to integrate into products and applications. It has focused its R&D on overcoming the three bottlenecks in the LiDAR industry: price, scalability, and reliability.
Livox’s automotive-grade solution is said to boast a range of industry-leading standards in terms of detection range, FOV (field-of-view), and point cloud density. The detection range of its Horiz sensor is 150 m (492 ft) for objects at 10% reflectivity, enabling Xpeng’s XPilot system to easily detect remote obstacles while on highways and urban roads.
The custom Xpeng solution also includes a new ultra FPS (frames-per-second) concept. Through its rotating-mirror technology, objects within the LiDAR’s ROI (region of interest) will be represented by 20-Hz point cloud data at a system frame rate of 10 Hz. So, ROI point-cloud density is increased to 144 lines equivalent at 0.1 s without the need for extra laser transmitters.
The increased point-cloud density enables the faster detection of objects including pedestrians, bicycles, and traffic cones. The horizontal FOV of the Horiz sensor has reached 120°, greatly enhancing the experience of drivers by resolving many persistent challenges including the removal of blind spots for cut-in vehicles.
For more information on Xpeng and the P7, visit https://en.xiaopeng.com.
