XPENG’s fifth Tech Day was held in Guangzhou on 24 October 2023. In one evening it opened four lines that a European owner still lives with.
XNGP came first. The system was running in five Chinese cities at the time, and the plan was 20 cities without high-definition map coverage by the end of November and 50 cities by year-end. The map qualifier is the whole point: XPENG wanted to show the car could manage without them. The release does not say whether the 50 includes the 20.
AI Valet Driver arrived the same evening. You drive a route yourself once, the car memorises it, and afterwards it can drive it again. One route and one scenario at a time, not autonomy in the general sense.
XBrain was presented as the architecture behind everything, built on XNet 2.0 for perception and XPlanner for planning and control. XPENG describes both as neural networks, models trained rather than rules written by hand.
XOS Tianji was the fifth generation of the cockpit operating system, with the XGPT language model to be folded into it. XPENG also says foundation models are used in design and code development as well.
The X9’s exterior was unveiled: a large seven-seat MPV, the first car on SEPA 2.0 and the first XPENG to ship with XOS Tianji. Rear-wheel steering as standard is called a world first, and that superlative is the company’s own.
AEROHT split the flying car into two tracks, eVTOL and modular flying cars. That split ends at the Land Aircraft Carrier.
And XPENG Robotics showed a new in-house bipedal robot built on XNet, XEEA and XGPT from the cars. The robot is not named in the release. The line runs to IRON, but the name was not said that evening.
Why the date is worth keeping
The cockpit operating system, the car in the showroom window, the flying car’s fork and the robot programme all started the same evening. It is the single date XPENG’s current range is best measured from. The XPENG X9 page has the MPV, and the XPENG company page has the rest of the business.
Images: XPENG
Sources
XPENG: 2023 Tech Day with XBrain, XOS Tianji, the X9 and the robot · 24 October 2023