XPeng's XNGP assisted driving system goes nationwide

Xpeng announced that its XNGP intelligent assisted driving system would be available to all XPeng users with intelligent driving experience.

The system has gone though a number of iterations having started as Highway NGP on the XPeng P7 in 2021. At that time the system was restricted to driving the car on highways where there was high precision mapping. The Lidar equipped Xpeng P5 in 2022 introduced City NGP initially to just Guangzhou which allowed assisted driving on urban roads which had been mapped. Last year saw the more advanced XNGP system debut on the Xpeng P7i and G9. Initially only working in Guangzhou, Shanghai and Shenzhen the system allowed a better degree of self-driving ability in mapped areas and across the country offered lane centering cruise control (LCC) which could stop and start the car at a traffic light but not undertake a left or right turn. Since the system went live in Apr last year XPeng has been adding more cities.

When launched XNGP was still map dependent but XPeng has now moved away from this meaning that the rollout can be much faster giving coverage to most of the country. Up until today's announcement the system was available in 243 Chinese cities, covering almost all the roads in China. Compared with the high-definition map based system, the map-free XNGP no longer requires high-definition maps which means both costs and the time to add areas is greatly reduced. Supposedly efficiency is up 384 times and the fastest start to end time with adding a new area is 1 to 2 days.

Currently the system covers 569,000 kilometres of roads and actual vehicle mileage has exceeded 3.7 million kilometres. XPeng say the accident rate is only a tenth of the level of human driving. With the highway element the number of takeovers is down to 1 in every 2000 km. Furthermore the average speed for vehicles using the highway part of NGP has increased by 13%. The user penetration rate for the highway NGP element is 94.7% while for the city portion it is 83.2% with 40% of overall mileage by cars being undertaken by the system.

It should be noted that Huawei is pushing similar driving capabilities nationwide and Li Auto is also at an advanced stage.

During Chinese New Year XPeng showed a video of a test car using XNGP in a village. The road was not wide enough for two cars to pass each other and the test car managed to safely navigate its way around with other road users. This included going when another car waited for it and equally waiting at another point for another car. There was also a very tight corner with vision blocked by a wall and the car successfully navigated this.

The electric vehicle (EV) maker's goal is for the XNGP to provide driver assistance in all scenarios, including highways, city roads, internal campus roads, and parking lots.

On Jan 30, He Xiaopeng, Xpeng's chairman and CEO, said the company will launch point-to-point XNGP capabilities in China in 2024, which will additionally cover internal roads and parking lot scenarios in addition to highways and city roads.

Xpeng will drive the global development of XNGP this year and next, with the development of globally available highway NGP beginning in 2024 and globally available XNGP in 2025.