XPeng sets records for longest autonomous drive

XPeng Inc., a leading Chinese smart electric vehicle company, today announced the consolidated results for its 3,000 km navigation-assisted autonomous driving expedition, China's longest real highway autonomous driving challenge by mass-produced vehicles.

The XPeng P7 fleet, which drove over 3,600+ km from Guangzhou to Beijing with 2,930 km highway driving under the control of the NGP (Navigation Guided Pilot), achieved an average of 0.71 human driver interventions per 100 km, setting a new benchmark for long-distance autonomous driving by mass production passenger vehicles.

“The expedition has fully challenged the robustness and reliability of the NGP function. The results demonstrate that it is not only the strongest, but also the easiest to use autonomous driving function for production vehicles available in the market,” said Mr. He Xiaopeng, Chairman and CEO of XPeng, at a press briefing in Beijing.

“We strive to become the world's top autonomous driving hardware and software provider, and our strategy and R&D capabilities place us well in achieving this goal,” Mr. He added.

Under the control of the NGP, the average success rate for lane changing and overtaking was 94.41% during the 8-day expedition, started from Guangzhou on 19 March and ending in Beijing on 26 March. The average highway ramp entering and exiting success rate was 92.76% and average tunnel pass-through success rate was 94.95% during the same period.

228 auto journalists, EV enthusiasts and industry experts participated in the expedition, driving a fleet of 12 to 15 P7s (depending on the date), visiting 10 cities in six provinces along China's eastern costal corridor. The route was chosen to cover some of the most complex yet representative road conditions and driving scenarios in China, to fully test the NGP's responses and effectiveness.

The NGP delivered stable performance in rainstorm conditions, passing through tunnels, and on highways in mountain areas during the 8-day expedition, showcasing its high robustness and reliability handling the complex driving scenarios in China.

The NGP highway solution provides navigation assisted autonomous driving from point A to B, based on the navigation route set by the driver, and is available on highways covered by high-precision maps in China. Its full-scenario high-definition positioning capability solves HD-map positioning challenges for China's highly complex road conditions, including areas with no GPS signals.

The NGP is enabled by the P7's strong underlying autonomous driving architecture, the most powerful system in production vehicles in China, with 14 cameras, 5 millimeter-wave radars, 12 ultrasonic sensors, centimeter-level high-definition positioning, decimeter-level high-definition mapping, NVIDIA Xavier system-on-the-chip computing platform, and Bosch iBooster brake system.

Currently, the XPeng P7 is China's only mass production car with a 360-degree dual camera and radar fusion perception system for added safety.