Xpeng P7 Electric Sedan
The Xpeng G3 made the top of my list of interesting cars at the 2018 Guangzhou Auto Show. In the lead-up to the 2019 edition of the show, Xpeng has announced that it has received $400 million in Series C capital funding from a number of strategic and institutional investors. The funding round was led by Xiaomi, a Chinese electronics company that makes things like smartphones, laptops and mobile apps.
Sometimes called a Tesla rival, Xpeng is a Chinese automaker that designs and builds two all-electric vehicles: the G3 SUV, on sale now, and the P7 four-door sedan, which will go on sale in the second quarter of 2020. The G3 stands out in the crowded EV field in China thanks to a swiveling camera that can pop out of the top of the car and is used to take pictures. The camera (and car) recognizes hand signals, like using a peace sign to trigger a countdown to taking a picture or flashing the “OK” sign to have the camera return to its standard position in the car. The G3 also features Xpeng’s proprietary Xmart OS in-car Intelligent System.
The upcoming P7 made its debut at the Shanghai Motor Show in April of this year and features a lot of the same advanced technology that’s in the G3. It will also get an advanced version of the company’s XPILOT autonomous driving technology. The P7 will use XPILOT 3.0 when it launches, and the company says the Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) system has been upgraded for city roads and highways in China. On the highway, Xpeng is promising Level 3 assistance, which should allow for automated lane changes but still means the driver will still need to take control in some situations. The P7 will also be capable of remembering commonly used parking spaces and then parking there automatically.
To see the world around it, the G3 uses 12 ultrasonic sensors, three millimeter band radard, five HD and one infrared cameras. Those sensors are only as good as the software behind them, though, and that’s why Xpeng sent multiple over-the-air updates to the G3 vehicles on the road in China throughout 2019. These changes made the automated parking systems in those vehicles more accurate and introduced active safety measures. The company says that its EVs have auto parked our 150,000 times and that over 95 percent of G3 owners use the car’s facial recognition to access the EV.
In addition to the 12 ultrasonic sensors, the P7 has 13 cameras on the outside (three forward-looking cameras, one forward-looking safety assist camera, five enhanced perception cameras and four 360-degree cameras), an in-cabin camera and five new HD millimeter radar sensors.
Xpeng is based Guangzhou and was started in 2014.
