Vehicles of Chinese electric car company Xpeng Motors (NYSE: XPEV) will be equipped with NGP high-speed autopilot for the first time.
On October 24, the second "1024 Xpeng Smart Day" was held in Guangzhou, where Xpeng announced the function details of its full-stack self-developed NGP High-Speed Autopilot, the latest updates of XPILOT Autopilot Assist System and Xmart OS Intelligent Cockpit System.
Xpeng Founder and Chairman He Xiaopeng said that the company will launch a smart car for each subsequent year, and accelerate the iterations of the smart driving system and smart car system.
Just two days before the event, Xpeng announced the release of Xmart OS 2.20 OTA upgrade software to P7 owners in batches, calling it "the first major OTA upgrade since the launch of P7".
In this update, nearly 100 updates are introduced, such as ACC adaptive cruise control, LCC lane centering assist, ALC automatic lane change assist, BSD, LCA, all-scene voice function, auto-parking function, and the most vociferous NGP pilot assist function.
In May this year, Xpeng released a test video about NGP, which is similar to Tesla NOA and Nio NOP in that it can realize ramp-to-ramp highway driving, and Xpeng is expected to be the third automaker in the world to launch this function.
The KPI of NGP is to make the strongest pilot-assisted driving function in China, said Wu Xinzhou, Xpeng's vice president of automated driving.
According to Xpeng, Xpeng NGP is similar to Nio NOP and is integrated with in-vehicle voice interchange to provide voice reminders for lane change, on- and off-ramps, and merging into the main road.
He Xiaopeng said that in the first quarter of 2021, Xpeng's test vehicle will drive more than 2,000 km from Guangzhou to Beijing in NGP mode.
In terms of automated driving, Xpeng is the second global car company after Tesla and the first in China to develop its own car based on an open computing platform. According to Wu Xinzhou, Xpeng has the ability to develop all the algorithm modules, especially visual perception.
According to the public data, Xpeng P7 adopts NVIDIA Xavier and is equipped with 14 cameras, 5 millimeter wave radars and 12 ultrasonic sensors.
At the event, He Xiaopeng reiterated the direction of "self-development" and said that smart cars should not only compete with quantity, but also focus on high-quality development in three dimensions: closed-loop capability, controllable data and growth speed.
At the end of August, Xpeng listed on the New York Stock Exchange. According to the prospectus, Xpeng's R&D investment in 2018 was RMB 1.05 billion, accounting for 62% of operating expenses; in 2019, the R&D investment will increase to RMB 2.07 billion, accounting for 64% of operating expenses; in the first half of 2020, Xpeng's R&D investment will account for 44% of operating expenses.
According to the data, Xpeng's cumulative deliveries reached 20,707 units by the end of July 2020.
