Today 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 April 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. 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 kilometers of roads and actual vehicle mileage has exceeded 3.7 million kilometers. 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.
Complete coverage soon?
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.
XNGP is currently only available in China. NGP will be launched in other markets this year before XNGP going global in 2025.
Editor’s note:
I have had mixed success with the city portion of XNGP. In Shanghai in a P7i it worked well but in Guangzhou in a G6 it did not. It seems however that XPeng is taking a continual improvement approach to the system and the video from the village shows an impressive level of driving. XNGP is available on all Lidar equipped Max versions of XPeng cars.
