James Yang Jianwen, Author
On October 24th, the Programmer’s Day, XiaoPeng Motors celebrates the Tech Day.
At last year’s Tech Day, XiaoPeng introduced impressive intelligent voice technology, high-speed navigation assistance, and parking memory assisted parking.
What surprises will XiaoPeng bring today, one year later?
Continue reading.
Supercharged Energy
This is the first time the keyword “Supercharged Energy” appears on 1024.
He XPeng, the founder and CEO of XPeng Motors, announced that the company will make a comprehensive layout in the field of supercharging and charging infrastructure.
For vehicles, XPeng expects to achieve 5-minute charging and a range of 200 km on China’s first mass-produced 800V high-voltage SiC platform.
Although many manufacturers have released relevant technologies, XPeng emphasized that he hopes to become the industry’s first.
For charging piles, the company has developed a self-designed 480kW high-voltage supercharging pile.
For charging stations, the company has developed a self-designed energy storage charging technology that can provide high-power supercharging for 30 vehicles without interruption.
In the next two years, XPeng will make additional layouts for high-speed charging.
As of September 30th this year, XPeng’s brand supercharging stations have reached 439 in total, covering 121 cities. The number of free charging stations has reached 1,648, covering 221 cities.
He XPeng said, “We hope to complete the construction of the supercharging system in all prefecture-level cities in China this year. We expect to cover most counties and even connect the vast majority of highways and their surrounding areas (internal targets) in China by improving key areas in 2022 and 2023.”
It is foreseeable that Supercharged Energy will also become a “regular” at future Tech Days.
Intelligent Driving: 3.5, 4.0, 5.0, and beyond
The NGP system, a feature I’m most interested in, is coming soon.# A Translation in English Markdown Text
XPeng Motors (XPENG) did research and found out that high-speed driving scenarios only account for 10% of a typical driver’s driving time. By connecting high-speed scenarios to urban main roads, expressways, and secondary roads, the 10% of driving time can be leveraged to 90%.
The Vice President of Autonomous Driving at XPENG, Wu Xinzhou, expressed excitement about this and said, “this means that assisted driving can have an impact on most of a driver’s time. If we can achieve the same user penetration rate for urban assisted driving as we do for high-speed NGP, then the intelligent assisted driving will become the norm for users during most of their driving time.”
In other words, XPENG wants to take more “driving time” away from its users.
With the ambition in place, XPENG’s abilities come under scrutiny.
Urban NGP
Over the past 6-8 months, XPENG’s intelligent driving team has mainly done the following work:
- Updated positioning: achieved cm-level high-precision positioning on highways, and dm-level positioning in urban scenarios
- Upgraded perception fusion architecture: changed from GPS as the core indicator, to visual data as the core indicator and supplemented by mmWave radar and lidar.
- Perception fusion upgrade: upgraded from double fusion to quadruple fusion: double vision coverage (8 driving cameras + 4 panoramic cameras), mmWave radar, and lidar
- Upgraded visual perception network: from 2D detection to 3D detection, with more target recognition, classification, and localization capabilities.
XPENG completely rewrote prediction and planning aspects from scratch, achieving end-to-end optimization while conducting 100,000 kilometers of daily simulation verifications to ensure that there are no regression changes in the scenario’s capabilities.
So, when will the Urban NGP be launched ?
Wu Xinzhou said that the first batch of cities will be opened in the first half of next year (PS: depending on regulatory restrictions and XPENG’s software development progress).
XPILOT4.0 is coming soon.Here comes XPilot 4.0 which can realize all-scenario intelligent assisted driving and will be launched in the first half of 2023.
According to Wu Xinzhou, the new car model (mid-to-large SUV) equipped with this feature will debut in the second half of this year (PS: it’s almost Chinese New Year).
At the hardware level, XP4.0 will use two NVIDIA Orin X chips with a computing power of 508TOPS; The domain controller will also be highly integrated, and an 8 million pixel front-facing binocular camera will be adopted.
At present, the software completion rate of XP4.0 is about 50% to 60%, and the XPeng team still needs to work harder.
Two flowers bloom with one branch.
XP5.0 is scheduled to be born while XP4.0 is not yet ready.
XPILOT 5.0 is Coming
“On XPilot 5.0, the ability will be further generalized. At the hardware level, all redundancies of sensors, controllers, and actuators will be realized. The new model equipped with 5.0 is the first truly automatic driving car model for XPeng, transitioning from smart assisted driving to automatic driving. “
Wu Xinzhou revealed that the overall architecture design of this new car has been completed.
But this is not all. At the press conference, He XPeng dropped another bombshell: in the second half of 2022, XPeng will become the first Chinese automaker to explore autonomous driving operation.
By the way, XPeng will also develop a fusion smart driving perception streaming media rearview mirror in the future.
Xmart OS 4.0
Regarding the smart cockpit, XPeng did not release too much information. There are only three known updates about Xmart OS 4.0:
- Provide end-to-end intelligent driving SR restoration with full-scene AI vision which will be mass-produced first;
- Take the lead in mass-producing an all-3D interface;
- Realize the full-scene 2.0 voice recognition, which can listen, think, and execute simultaneously.
# Xmart OS 4.0 Will Be Launched with the Introduction of a Brand-new Car Model Next Year.
Flying Car: Mass Production in 2024
As we all know, XPENG Motors has been expanding into the field of flying cars, and now there’s something new on the horizon.
First, let’s take a look at their track record: Xpeng Heitech, their flying car arm, has already completed over 15,000 flights since 2016, and has launched five generations of models.
Oh, and before that, it just completed a Series A funding round, raising more than $500 million USD at a pre-money valuation of over $1 billion USD.
Now, they’ve already entered the 6th generation of the flying car. XPENG’s expectation for it is: “runnable and flyable”.
At first, I thought the 6th generation was still just a concept, and I was even impressed by XPENG’s thorough research on the concept: minimizing the size of the flying car, making the mode switching more flexible, how to fly the plane, and lightweight design…
I didn’t expect it to come so fast. He XPeng said that the flying car will achieve mass production in 2024.
As for pricing, the expected final selling price will be controlled within RMB 1 million.
“I hope that XPENG Heitech can become the world’s largest group company in the field of low-altitude manned flight 10 or 20 years from now,” said He XPeng.
Smart Robot: Ma
As for this intelligent robot horse, we’ve all seen it before.
XPENG Motors has announced its research and development progress on this smart robot. Let’s just show the pictures:
However, at present, the launch of this robotic horse may still be a distant goal. Let’s see what progress will be made tomorrow in the 1024 event.
Summary
Overall, XPeng’s technology day provided a great deal of information, showcasing the company’s advancements in energy, autonomous driving, and even flying cars. It even set up its goals for the next few years:
2021: Launch of XP4.0
2022: Launch of NGP, making XPeng the first automaker in China to explore autonomous driving operations.
2023: Launch of XP4.0
2024: Mass production of flying cars.
Undoubtedly, XPeng is not satisfied with being just a car manufacturer and is constantly expanding its boundaries of ability, with intelligence still at its core.
Several years ago, XPeng began exploring intelligence, and now we see the fruits of that labor. This time, it was the first time that XPeng had brought discussions about flying cars and intelligent robots to a technology day. We can expect to see them regularly in the future 1024 events.
OK, that’s all the content for XPeng’s 1024 technology day. See you at the next 1024!
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.