Xpeng-backed startup aims for flying car production by 2025
Xpeng-backed startup aims for flying car production by 2025. Credit: Xpeng

Chinese electric vehicle maker Xpeng Motors said on Tuesday its advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) will be able to work on all Chinese roadways in the fourth quarter of this year. This will include roads within university campuses and corporate compounds and will also cover parking spaces across the country, the company said. The move will provide users with “door-to-door” automated driving experiences in every city in mainland China, though there will be exceptions for restricted areas such as government compounds and high security zones, chief executive He Xiaopeng told a press conference in the city of Guangzhou on Tuesday.

He said the company’s testing fleet has traveled nearly 7.6 million kilometers (4.7 million miles) and covered 2,595 domestic cities, making it the only Chinese automaker that “has invested so heavily or at least several billion RMB each year,” in the technology. He added the iterations of its end-to-end neural networks now come once every two days, an approached advocated by Tesla and meaning that the ADAS learns by mimicking human decisions with large amounts of data and reduces the reliance on explicit coding. Tesla’s Chinese challenger said in January that its Navigation Guided Pilot (XNGP) software was already available to users in 243 Chinese cities. [TechNode reporting, Xpeng release, in Chinese]