Tesla rival Xpeng promises autonomous driving to P7 electric car owners ahead of Lunar New Year
- Xpeng says mass-produced models of its P7 sports sedan will get an over-the-air update with autonomous driving features before Lunar New Year in February
- The electric carmaker calls its Navigation Guided Pilot a level 3 autonomous driving technology
Chinese electric carmaker Xpeng Motors said it will deliver level 3 autonomous driving capabilities to its mass-produced sports sedan ahead of Lunar New Year, ramping up its competition with NIO and Tesla, which also have limited autonomous driving capabilities in their vehicles.
Level 3 automation allows drivers to safely take their attention off the road under certain conditions, but they must still be prepared to intervene when the system is unable to execute a certain task. Highways are considered ideal for L3 applications because they provide a less complicated environment without pedestrians and with cars all moving in the same direction.
Xpeng tested the beta version of its Navigation Guided Pilot (NGP), the name for its autonomous driving function, on the Xpeng P7 sports sedan while driving on highways in Guangzhou on Wednesday. Xpeng said the system will be installed on mass-produced P7 models through an over-the-air update ahead of Lunar New Year in the middle of February.
“Among all the mass-produced car models, Xpeng P7 has the best configuration for autonomous driving,” said Ma Jun, project director at Xpeng Autonomous Driving Center, in a speech on Wednesday.
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Aiding the P7’s autonomous driving are the car’s 12 ultrasonic sensors, five millimetre-wave radar sensors and 14 cameras. Xpeng said NGP relies on high-precision digital maps to enable autonomous driving on all of China’s major highways. Although drivers need to keep their hands on the steering wheel at all times, the P7 can still switch lanes, enter tunnels and avoid obstacles by itself once it has NGP installed.
“China is known for its complex road conditions with a large variety of parking scenarios. These could be complicated traffic signals, unknown types of vehicles, mixed types of pedestrians, construction sites, etc, which all make autonomous driving and auto parking very challenging,” said Wu Xinzhou, the company’s vice-president of autonomous driving.
Xpeng said NGP was specifically designed for road conditions in China. The system can handle adverse weather such as rainy days and complex roads without GPS signals. It also includes the ability to follow other vehicles on congested roads and recognise and avoid traffic cones and large trucks.
Other autonomous driving technologies such as Tesla Autopilot and Cadillac Super Cruise are already available to consumers, but those technologies are considered level 2, which enables vehicles to control speed and steering. The big difference between L2 and L3 is that the former still requires drivers to keep their attention on the road at all times.
Although Tesla has updated Autopilot with many L3 features, including one that allows the vehicle to decide which lane it should be on, it is not officially recognised as L3 yet. But Tesla already has its sights set on higher levels of automation. Tesla CEO Elon Musk bragged at Shanghai’s annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) last July that Tesla was “very close” to L5 autonomous driving technology.
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Japanese carmaker Honda also announced in November 2020 that it would start producing and selling an L3 version of its Honda Legend luxury sedan in Japan starting in March. German carmaker Audi had been working on its own L3 technology called Traffic Jam Pilot, but the company said last year that it had scrapped plans to deploy it.
If Xpeng’s promises hold up, the P7 could become the first vehicle available to consumers with L3 autonomous driving functions. However, the definitions of L2 and L3 are not always sufficient to distinguish the many forms of automation that are currently under development, and Xpeng said it considers some Tesla Autopilot features to be already at L3.
Founded in 2014, Guangzhou-based Xpeng is one of China’s several Tesla competitors looking for an edge in the country’s highly competitive electric vehicle market. The P7, launched in April 2020, is the company’s second vehicle, following the G3 in 2018.
