XPENG held AI Day on 5 November 2025 and put dates on VLA 2.0 for the first time. By the end of December 2025 pioneer users would be invited in, and in the first quarter of 2026 the system would roll out fully to XPENG’s Ultra models.
Ultra is a trim Europe does not get. The release says nothing about any other trim or any other market.
There is one line a European reader can use. Volkswagen becomes the launch customer of XPENG VLA 2.0, and XPENG’s Turing chip has secured the nomination from Volkswagen. XPENG does not say which vehicle, which market or which year.
What VLA 2.0 is
XPENG describes it as a path from vision straight to action with no translation into language along the way. The cloud model has 72 billion parameters and runs on a 30,000-card compute cluster, with a full iteration cycle every five days. The training material is nearly 100 million clips, which XPENG equates to the difficult situations a human driver would meet in 65,000 years behind the wheel. That is a figure of speech, not a measurement.
In the car the model runs at billions of parameters on the Ultra model’s 2,250 TOPS. On narrow roads XPENG claims a 13-fold improvement in miles between takeovers, without saying what it is compared against or which roads were driven.
One detail from the stage is worth carrying: XPENG’s own slide says the 30,000 cards sit on Alibaba Cloud. The body text presents the cluster as XPENG’s own. It is rented compute.
Robotaxi and the rest
Three robotaxi models in 2026 and the start of trial operation. A new driver-assistance trim called Robo arrives in 2026, sharing the robotaxi’s hardware, redundancy and capability. The hardware is four Turing chips at up to 3,000 TOPS, no lidar and no high-definition maps, so pure vision, with dual redundancy throughout. Amap is the first global ecosystem partner.
IRON gained 82 degrees of freedom in the body and 22 in a hand at life size, three Turing chips and solid-state batteries. XPENG added a fourth law to Asimov’s three: private data does not leave the robot. The goal is large-scale production of humanoid robots by the end of 2026.
The flying-car plant began trial production on 3 November 2025 and built the first Land Aircraft Carrier. Planned capacity is 10,000 a year, 5,000 to start, and one aircraft every 30 minutes at full rate. Global orders exceeded 7,000.
The promise from 2024
In May 2024 He Xiaopeng said XPENG would reach an L4-level autonomous driving experience in China in 2025. This release, from November 2025, has VLA 2.0 reaching pioneer users at the end of the year and full rollout in the first quarter of 2026, with the robotaxi in trial operation in 2026. The 2024 promise is neither met nor mentioned.
Everything in the release is Chinese apart from the Volkswagen line. The robotaxi in internal testing and Turing behind the agent are the two threads that have got furthest since.
Images: XPENG
Sources
XPENG: VLA 2.0, robotaxi and IRON at AI Day · 5 November 2025