XPENG held AI Day on 6 November 2024, streamed from the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou with He Xiaopeng on stage.
The Kunpeng Super Electric System is 800 volts with silicon carbide, a 5C battery, a hybrid drive unit and a very quiet range extender that XPENG puts at as little as 1 dB. The system switches between pure electric and range-extended running on its own.
The charging figures need careful reading. XPENG writes one kilometre of range per second and 80 per cent in 12 minutes. It does not say where the charge starts, so the window is unknown, and the figure only compares with others once the starting point is known. The new liquid-cooled S5 station is said to deliver more than a kilometre a second, and AI Battery Doctor is claimed to extend battery life by up to 30 per cent.
Range is given as 430 km on electricity alone and more than 1,400 km combined. No test cycle appears anywhere, not CLTC, not WLTP, not EPA. Without one the numbers cannot be compared with anything.
The Turing chip has 40 cores, supports models of up to 30 billion parameters and, in XPENG’s words, delivers the power of three high-performance chips in one. The Canghai platform is claimed to support full L4 with 33 times the bandwidth and 12 times faster image processing; what those multiples are measured from is not stated. AIOS puts GPT-4o models directly in the car, driven by two Turing chips, and XPENG trails a chip upgrade for existing owners without saying where, when or for which cars.
The robotaxi in Ultra trim gets Turing chips and Canghai with 3,000 T of processing power, L4-level safety and hardware redundancy. AEROHT’s flying car flew in public in November with pre-orders in December. And the IRON robot was shown after five years of development, already in use in XPENG’s own factories and stores.
The whole evening was a Chinese announcement with no European market, price, date or homologation, and the P7+ launched the next day as the world’s first AI-defined vehicle, again in China.
Five threads from that evening have since become European stories: Turing behind the agent, the robotaxi in internal testing, IRON on the production line, driver assistance going global in 2027 and the range extender that became Super REEV.
Images: XPENG
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