HE Xiaopeng announced today that the new product release conference for Xpeng G3 will be officially held on Dec 12. In this exhibition, Xiaopeng Motors also demonstrated two new intelligent functions and released its own solution for "mileage-anxiety" of EV users in China.
Nov 16, 2018, Xiaopeng Motors showed at the Guangzhou International Automobile Exhibition, with its intelligent electric SUV, Xpeng G3, for the first time.
HE Xiaopeng (何小鹏), the chairman & CEO of the company, showed at the exhibition with an announcement that the new product release conference for Xpeng G3 will be officially held on Dec 12.
Actually, in Oct 2017, Version 1.0 of Xpeng G3 had got off the production line in the lead among EV maker startups in China, however, vehicles of version 1.0 then had been only delivered to employees of Xiaopeng Motors, internally. Because of this, Xiaopeng Motors was also doubted to be lack of ability of production, while on the contrary, HE Xiaopeng believes that "slow is fast", and better preparation leads to a better result.
“One of our competitor's electric vehicle could not be charged with charging piles of other brands, this issue had already been found on our version 1.0 vehicle, etc." HE Xiaopeng once said, and the competitor he mentioned was NIO. By this, HE was eager to prove Xiaopeng Motors' rigorous route would be better than NIO, which now has a great chance to deliver over 10,000 electric vehicles within this year, and to win the bet (of delivering over 10,000 vehicles) between HE and LI Bin (李斌), the CEO of NIO.
So far, G3 version 1.0 has delivered hundreds of internal employees, with a monthly test mileage of more than 500,000 kilometers, and a totally cumulative test mileage of over 10 million kilometers that spent 100,000 hours.
Besides the promise of launching and delivering Xpeng G3 on Dec 12, Xiaopeng Motors also demonstrated a few intelligent and interesting functions:
The Little P (小P), an intelligent voice assistant which can receive, understand, process and execute the natural language commands from drivers and passengers, implement navigation control, automatic parking, making calls, playing music, air conditioning control, and interacting with almost all functional modules in the car.
360º Roof Camera, which can be remotely interacted with, even outside the car. Customers can control the camera to rotate, take pictures, and retract into the roof. The photos then can be immediately shared with friends via onboard Wi-Fi.
However, the two functions above are only available on mid-high end models of G3, according to the configuration information released before.
As to the "mileage-anxiety" of EV users, Xiaopeng Motors gives a solution of operating its own supercharging stations (30 available in more than 10 Tier 1-2 cities in the upcoming spring of 2019), with addition of access to nearly 100,000 third-party charging piles, covering basically the country's major core cities and roads. Xiaopeng Motors plans to sign up to 1,000 supercharge stations in the next three years and have 200 supercharge stations available in nearly 30 cities in 2019.
- Author: ZHANG Fan; AN An contributed to this article. Write to ZHANG Fan at ZhangFan@EqualOcean.com