China’s Xpeng bringing its Tesla FSD equivalent to overseas owners, We look forward to enabling overseas users to access Xpeng’s autonomous driving that is already available in China.
The Chinese competitor to Tesla, Xpeng, intends to leverage its smart driving software as a selling factor and has its sights set on the global market.
At a press conference this week, the Guangzhou-based electric car startup announced that it will begin developing its highway-specific Navigation Guided Pilot (NGP) for global customers in 2024 and that it will start developing its next-generation, all-purpose XNGP feature for international use in 2025.
Xiaopeng He, the company’s founder and CEO, stated at the ceremony, “We look forward to enabling overseas users to access Xpeng’s autonomous driving that is already available in China,”
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NGP and its upgraded variant XNGP are comparable to Full-Self Driving (FSD), Tesla’s semi-autonomous driving technology. In particular, XNGP serves as the marketing alias for all of Xpeng’s advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) capabilities, including self-parking and highway and urban driving.
XNGP has eliminated pre-computed information from high-definition maps, which were previously used for navigation. This allows Xpeng vehicles to drive anywhere by utilizing sensors such as lidars and radars to identify real-time road conditions.
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Xpeng, which was founded in 2014, left China for the first time in late 2021, traveling first to Europe. Subsequently, it has dispatched its electric SUVs and sports sedans to Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden; Germany, France, and the United Kingdom are scheduled to receive them in 2024. Along with a swarm of other Chinese electric vehicle companies heading to the Middle East, Xpeng started selling in Israel last year.
How well Xpeng’s map-free driver-assist technology does in these uncharted areas is yet up to speculation.
