Danish journalists complained about the driver assistance in XPENG’s cars. From the start of December 2023 a team of five or six people from XPENG’s Autonomous Driving Center was in Denmark with a handful of test cars, driving Danish roads alongside the company’s Danish staff. The team was led by Dr Jun Ma, senior director, from a centre with more than 1,000 engineers in China and 50 in Silicon Valley and Munich.
None of that is in an XPENG release. It is in the trade title Motormagasinet, and XPENG relayed it itself in its Belgian newsroom. Everything about the stay, the test cars and the improvements comes from that reporting, passed on by XPENG.
The journalist found three things better. Warning sounds were cut sharply, so the car no longer made a racket when you exceeded the limit or switched the assistance off. The car held the middle of the lane instead of fighting the markings. And it no longer drifted to the side, forcing a correction that disengaged the system.
One thing was still wrong. On a stretch with cars parked at the roadside the car braked once. Jun Ma called that unacceptable and said it would be fixed.
In the same interview Jun Ma says XPENG is close to a deal with a global map supplier for European roads, where map data would supply speed limits for the car to follow. No supplier is named. Two and a half years passed before XPENG said its navigation outside China runs on Google Maps. Whether that is the deal he meant, the text does not say.
The beta
On 6 March 2024 XPENG opened a beta of version 4.4.0 for the P7 and G9. A thousand European owners signed up, within a couple of days according to the Norwegian version of the release. The test software went out over the air, and installation takes about fifteen minutes depending on the connection. Owners who did not want to take part could simply wait for the final update. The whole thing was built in-house in three months on feedback from European customers and journalists.
What 4.4.0 changes
The list is XPENG’s own, item by item.
- ACC brakes unnecessarily less often, and XPENG’s own example is cars parked at the roadside. Speed reduction is better judged, the following distance more natural, and switching from LCC to ACC with a steering input now keeps the set speed.
- Driver monitoring can be set to three levels, low, normal and high. The default moves to normal, and what used to be the default is now called high.
- The traffic-light state for your own lane appears at the top of the driver display, for sun glare or a blocked view.
- ALC signals more clearly when an automatic lane change is possible, and the acceleration afterwards is better timed.
- LSS warns only where it is necessary and legally required, and the lane-departure intervention is gentler, with weaker vibration through the wheel.
- Acceleration and braking are better timed when the car ahead changes lane or another cuts in. LCC holds speed and line better through curves.
- Sounds and visual notifications during ACC, LCC and ALC are sharply reduced.
- Automatic high beam sees oncoming and preceding traffic better in the dark and switches off and back on by itself.
- Bluetooth call audio is improved.
- A bug had left remaining range showing only in kilometres. You can again choose between distance and battery percentage.
- Charging stations can be filtered by power in the navigation, which ties into preconditioning the battery before a fast stop.
- The 360-degree camera view is improved, and demisting works better in wet and cold conditions.
- Function names and descriptions in the infotainment are rewritten in Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian.
After the beta
The final 4.4.0 was due later that month for all European owners, with no date and no market list. Only the P7 and G9 are named; the G6, then arriving in Europe, is not.
The Dutch release has the beta starting on 6 March, the Norwegian one on 11 March. Either the markets started on different days or the text was reused.
It is still the most detailed public account of what XPENG fixed in the driver assistance on European cars, and it exists because people in Denmark said something.
Images: XPENG
Sources
XPENG Benelux: a thousand European owners in the 4.4.0 beta · 6 March 2024
XPENG Benelux relaying Motormagasinet on the ADAS team in Denmark
XPENG Norway: the same beta, with sign-ups inside a couple of days · 11 March 2024