Name: Xiao Dingdang
Age: 23
Status: Fresh Graduate
Experience Car: XPeng P7 Rear-Wheel Drive Long-Range Smart Prestige Edition
First, let me show you two pictures of my lovely car:
Before I got the chance to test drive the XPeng P7, I had only seen it from afar on the road or outside of a showroom. At that time, I thought it was just an ordinary sedan with a sloping roof. However, at the moment I first laid eyes on the test drive car, I was amazed by its size, which exceeded my expectations. With a wheelbase of 2,998mm, it was even longer than my previous C63. The trunk was also deep enough to hold a lot of items. When I approached the car, the lighting and the futuristic sound both gave me a little surprise. The only downside was that the door felt heavy when I opened it. The seats were much more comfortable than those of the high-performance car I had driven before, and the wrap-around feeling was also quite good. The smoothness of the car’s infotainment system was acceptable, without any particularly laggy feeling. Moreover, it had pretty complete functions, including the ability to play Landlord’s Mahjong on the car, but for me, I would probably just use the navigation and music functions.
The multi-colored ambient lighting could also satisfy my need to change colors at any time. Sometimes the physical buttons on the steering wheel weren’t very responsive, requiring multiple presses to get a response.
Throughout my several test drives, the most impressive thing to me was the quietness, good sound insulation, and faster throttle response. The relative disadvantage might be the issue of finding a charging station slot being occupied by petrol cars when using a charging station. I found a charging station with fast charging on the map, but after driving there according to the navigation, I found that almost all the fast charging slots were occupied by petrol cars. Although some charging stations have used electronic parking locks to solve the issue of petrol car occupancy, it still happens quite frequently (painful lesson of going to 4 charging stations within one night). Additionally, the test drive car was registered in a foreign place, which was very inconvenient due to the restriction of the license plate policy. If I bought the car in Shanghai, it would not have been a problem to get a local license plate.
During several days of test driving, I was really looking forward to the XPeng P7’s NGP (Navigation Guided Pilot) advanced driving assistance system. In order to experience NGP in more scenarios, I deliberately chose different driving scenarios.
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First scenario: During rush hour, driving from Pudong Airport to Jing’an District via the outer ring expressway and then surface roads.
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Second scenario: Leaving Pudong Airport at 2 o’clock in the morning, taking the outer ring expressway and then the Hulun Expressway to Lingang.The weather was all sunny. During the rush hour, the traffic was extremely heavy. After merging onto the main road from the ramp, NGP turned on. I am not sure if it was because of my aggressive driving habits that even though I adjusted the following distance to the first gear, I still felt that the distance from the front car was far. There were occasional situations of being cut in. In the face of being cut in, NGP could also respond quickly to brake. However, sometimes the cut-in was too sudden, and the distance was extremely limited, so I had to take control to brake. In the congested road section, the following distance in the first gear was still relatively larger than that of other vehicles, and there were still situations of being cut in. Relative to the attention reminder during high-speed driving, the reminder frequency during low-speed driving was controlled within a comfortable range for me. After the rush hour, there were frequent situations of cars overtaking from behind. The car couldn’t automatically exit the ramp and reminded me to take over manually.
In order to experience the automatic ramp-exiting function, I deliberately set off at 2:00 in the morning, when there were basically no cars on the road. The performance of NGP far exceeded my expectations, with a comfortable lane-changing experience, precise recognition of lanes, and timely ramp exiting. It also did not affect the assisted driving effect due to limited lighting conditions at night. Overall, I am quite satisfied.
Although it is an electric vehicle, with no roar of the engine and explosive exhaust, the playfulness is still very high. The overall state of the chassis is still OK. The suspension may be too soft for me, which may be due to the fact that the suspension of my previous car has always been very hard.
Finally, there was a small incident before returning the car. While driving on Xupu Bridge, the tire pressure detection suddenly prompted that the left front tire pressure had lost data, and the right front tire pressure lost data in the next second, which really surprised me. Then I found the tire pressure calibration button and completed the operation according to the prompt. After that, the tire pressure displayed normally. However, when another user used the car at night, the same situation occurred. I am not sure if the specific reason is a software or hardware problem.
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.