An executive of Tesla's Chinese rival and Alibaba-backed Xpeng Motors (NYSE: XPEV) said version 3.0 of its autopilot software XPilot will be available in the first quarter of 2021.
On October 24, 2020, Wu Xinzhou, current Vice President of Xpeng's autopilot department, mentioned this plan when he shared Xpeng's progress on Autopilot at the 1024 Xpeng Smart Day event.
According to Wu Xinzhou, there is no absolute strong player in autonomous driving, and even Tesla may not be able to adapt to certain environment.
In a benchmarking video with Tesla, the NoA framework-based Model 3 changed lanes on a typical Chinese highway, often making "inexplicable" and ineffective moves, and missed a turn into a service area.
The NGP-equipped Xpeng, on the other hand, drives reliably in most road conditions and does not make the same mistake as the former.
Xpeng, with its combination of perception, behavior planning, motion prediction and map fusion modules, is more suitable for China's road conditions in a production vehicle, Wu Xinzhou said, adding that Xpeng can do things like traffic cone recognition and avoidance, large truck avoidance, and can handle extreme conditions such as heavy rain, nighttime, highly complex road conditions, and no GPS signal.
According to Wu Xinzhou, Xpeng has made "the best self-parking system in China", and since 2020, Xpeng users (XPilot 2.5) have covered 85% of parking scenarios and spent an average of 32.3 seconds using the self-parking system.
Based on XPilot 3.0, Xpeng implements the "parking memory parking" function, which allows the P7 to fully park once and park the next time without human intervention.
"It is the world's first autonomous parking system that can be mass-produced and does not rely on car park modifications, extending the parking range to the 'last mile'," said Wu Xinzhou, "Every time I go home, I don't have to drive myself anymore."
More From CnEVPost
