On 31 October 2022 Guangzhou allowed XPENG to run self-driving tests on designated public roads. Three municipal authorities had to approve it. The car was a G9, and what made it notable was everything XPENG had left alone.
XPENG wrote that its mass-produced G9s qualified with no hardware reconfiguration, on software upgrades alone. The test cars ran the same sensors, the same chips and the same vehicle control as the cars customers bought.
The frame had been set a week earlier, at XPENG’s Tech Day on 24 October. XNGP had been introduced at the G9 launch that September and ran on 508 TOPS, dual LiDAR and 8-megapixel cameras. The city driving pilot in China had started in September, and XPENG also set out XNet, the neural network behind its visual recognition, and the training facility that on the company’s own figures cut one model training run from 276 days to 11 hours.
The same idea four years later
Building the robotaxi on a car people can buy is the whole argument, and XPENG has held to it. When the company put robotaxis on the road for internal testing in July 2026, the cars sat on the GX platform you can find in a showroom, and that story has the detail.
The XPENG Robotaxi page describes the car, and the XPENG GX page covers the platform it shares with cars you can buy.
Images: XPENG
Sources
XPENG: permit for autonomous road tests in Guangzhou · 1 November 2022