XPENG held its fourth annual 1024 Tech Day at its Guangzhou headquarters on 24 October 2022. There the company showed the technology behind its XNGP driver assistance system and its progress on robotaxis.
XNGP had been presented at the G9 launch in September. XPENG described the system as its last step before full autonomy. It was to handle motorways, complex city streets and parking, and to work in areas without high-definition maps. The hardware comprised two lidars, 8-megapixel cameras and 508 TOPS of compute.
XNet and the training of the driver assistance system
XNet was XPENG’s new neural network for recognising the surroundings from the images of several cameras. Training took place at the Fuyao supercomputing centre, built on Alibaba Cloud’s platform and able, according to XPENG, to deliver 600 PFLOPS.
XPENG said the time for a training run could be cut from 276 days to 11 hours. After optimisation XNet used, by the company’s account, 9 percent of an Orin-X chip’s compute, against 122 percent before.
The company also said its work on AI and data had cut the frequency of incidents with Highway NGP by 95 percent.
Voice control for new cars in China
Version 2.0 could, according to XPENG, recognise commands from different passengers and handle several conversations at once with an accuracy above 96 percent. The system worked without a wake word and without a network connection. XPENG gave a response time on screen of 245 milliseconds and a spoken response in under 700 milliseconds.
The new voice system was to be standard in all new XPENG cars in China.
The G9 as a robotaxi test car
At Tech Day XPENG said the G9 had passed an authority-led autonomous driving test on a closed course in Guangzhou. The company intended to use series-production cars as the basis for robotaxis to keep costs down. Dr Xinzhou Wu, XPENG’s vice president in charge of autonomous driving, presented the approach as a route to lower costs and control of quality and safety.
On 1 November XPENG announced the permit for tests on public roads, which the company had received on 31 October. The G9 test cars in China had been adapted through software upgrades without changes to the hardware.
A flying car with a new rotor design
XPENG AEROHT also showed a new layout for its electric flying car. Two horizontal rotors had been replaced by several distributed rotors. According to XPENG the test aircraft had completed its first flight and several trials in which a single motor failed.
In July 2026 XPENG announced internal testing of robotaxis and plans for a global launch of NGP in 2027. The later NGP system was to build on VLA 2.0 and was being adapted for Europe.
Images: XPENG
Sources
XPENG: mobility technologies revealed at 2022 Tech Day · 24 October 2022
XPENG: G9 receives road test permit · 1 November 2022
XPENG: internal robotaxi testing · July 2026
XPENG: NGP powered by VLA 2.0 being localized for Europe · July 2026