On 31 October 2022 Guangzhou granted XPENG permission to run self-driving tests on designated public roads. According to the company’s release the next day, the G9 was the first unmodified series-production vehicle to obtain the approval. The permit came from the city’s industry and information technology, public security and transport authorities.
The car was a G9 in the same specification as the ones customers bought. XPENG wrote that its mass-produced G9s qualified with no hardware changes, on software upgrades alone. The test cars used the same hardware suite as the production models, including perception sensors, computing hardware and vehicle-control systems.
XPENG had set out the frame a week earlier, at its Tech Day on 24 October. The company had introduced XNGP at the G9 launch that September, running on 508 TOPS, two lidars and 8-megapixel cameras. The city driving pilot in China had started in September, and XPENG also set out XNet, the neural network behind its visual recognition, and the training facility that on the company’s own figures cut one model training run from 276 days to 11 hours.
Later test driving
In July 2026 XPENG again put robotaxis on the road for internal testing, as the story on the internal test sets out.
The XPENG Robotaxi page gathers the overview of the company’s self-driving projects.
Images: XPENG
Sources
XPENG: permit for autonomous road tests in Guangzhou · 1 November 2022