On 16 March 2024, at a summit in Beijing, He Xiaopeng announced that XPENG would create a new brand in China for A-class electric cars priced between RMB 100,000 and 150,000, which XPENG itself puts at USD 15,000 to 23,000. The press release followed three days later. The brand is not named in it. Mona came later.
The case rests on market data from the China Passenger Car Association. That price band was about 34 per cent of the Chinese market in 2023, up from about 31 per cent in 2022, and more than eight million cars a year are sold in it. XPENG’s own reading of the gap is that few products in the band offer smart driving, and fewer still offer AI-driven smart driving.
The same day XPENG committed RMB 3.5 billion to R&D in 2024 and 4,000 new employees, and said large AI models would reach the cars in the second quarter. On 29 February 2024 the company had opened XNGP with no city or route restriction for experienced users, and it reckoned 83 per cent of monthly active users were using urban driving.
The word global
The release calls the new brand an offer to young customers worldwide and to the younger generation globally. Everything concrete in the text is Chinese: the price band, the market analysis, the segment. There is no European plan, no European price and no date. The tension between the word global and an entirely Chinese basis sits in XPENG’s own text.
For a Danish buyer this is the dated beginning of a price gap that is still there. XPENG built a brand for cars far below anything it has ever sold in Europe. The L03 is the closest Europe has come, and it descends from the same family; its world premiere was in Munich in July 2026, two and a half years after this release.
2024 was XPENG’s tenth year, and the company framed the move as the start of a multi-brand phase. “The next decade of new energy vehicles will be a decade of intelligence,” He Xiaopeng said. The XPENG company page has the rest.
Images: XPENG
Sources
XPENG: a new brand for A-class EVs between RMB 100,000 and 150,000 · 19 March 2024