Xpeng Announces Next-gen Autonomous Driving Architecture at Auto Guangzhou 2020

Xpeng Inc. (“Xpeng” or the “Company”, NYSE: XPEV), a leading Chinese smart electric vehicle (“Smart EV”) company, today announced its next-generation autonomous driving architecture at Auto Guangzhou 2020.

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Xpeng P7 Smart Sports Sedan (Photo: Business Wire)

Xpeng has significantly upgraded its autonomous driving software and hardware systems for the 2021 production models. The Company has become the first car manufacturer to adopt Lidar (laser for imaging, detection and ranging) as a new hardware component for its next-generation autonomous driving architecture, significantly improving the vehicle’s high-precision object recognition performance.

“Introducing Lidar technology into production vehicles is a breakthrough in popularizing autonomous driving, and an endorsement of our in-house R&D process. Our customers will benefit from this premium advanced technology, which makes autonomous driving more driver-friendly, safe and effective,” said He Xiaopeng, Chairman & CEO of Xpeng.

The new hardware architecture is a combination of high-definition (HD) cameras, millimeter-wave radars, ultrasonic sensors, Lidar, high-precision positioning and mapping systems, all powered by a high-performance computing platform. Equipped with a total of 32 sensors, the system provides the strongest hardware redundancy, effectively avoiding single-system failure to deliver enhanced safety protection. It will also cover more usage scenarios, effectively enabling Xpeng vehicles to perform low-speed Navigation Guided Pilot (NGP) functions for city driving.

The software architecture is based on a full-stack of in-house-developed technologies, consisting of multiple modules: perception, behavior planning, behavior/motion prediction and map fusion, among others, forming a fully closed loop of data and algorithms to support rapid functional iteration.

This next-generation autonomous driving architecture will deliver major enhancements, including:

Enhanced integrated control unit

The XPU autonomous driving intelligent control unit integrates vehicle control and parking functions, making decision-making and execution more efficient. At the same time, by streamlining the number of controllers and wiring harnesses, the weight of the system is reduced.