XPeng Motors, a leading Chinese smart electric vehicle company, has announced the consolidated results for its 3,000km (1865 miles) navigation-assisted autonomous driving expedition. This is China’s longest real highway autonomous driving challenge by mass-produced vehicles.
The XPeng P7 fleet, which drove over 3,600+km (2237+ miles) from Guangzhou to Beijing with 2,930km (1821 miles) highway driving under the control of the Navigation Guided Pilot (NGP), achieved an average of 0.71 human driver interventions per 100km (62 miles). This set a new benchmark for long-distance autonomous driving by mass production passenger vehicles.
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Mr He Xiaopeng, XPeng CEO, said: “The expedition has fully challenged the robustness and reliability of the NGP function. The results demonstrate that it is not only the strongest, but also the easiest to use autonomous driving function for production vehicles available in the market.”
“We strive to become the world’s top autonomous driving hardware and software provider, and our strategy and R&D capabilities place us well in achieving this goal.”
Under the control of the NGP, the average success rate for lane changing and overtaking was 94.41 percent during the eight-day expedition, started from Guangzhou on 19 March and ending in Beijing on 26 March. The average highway ramp entering and exiting success rate was 92.76 percent and the average tunnel pass-through success rate was 94.95 percent during the same period.
The expedition included 228 auto journalists, electric vehicle enthusiasts and industry experts. They drove a fleet of 12 to 15 P7 electric cars, depending on the date, visiting 10 cities in six provinces along China’s eastern coastal corridor. The route was chosen to cover some of the most complex, yet representative road conditions and driving scenarios in China, to fully test the NGP’s responses and effectiveness.
The NGP also delivered a stable performance in rainstorm conditions, passing through tunnels, and on highways in mountain areas during the eight-day expedition. This showcased its robustness and reliability in handling the complex driving scenarios in China.
The NGP highway solution provides navigation assisted autonomous driving from point A to B. This is based on the navigation route set by the driver and is available on highways covered by high-precision maps in China. Its full-scenario high-definition positioning capability solves high definition-map positioning challenges for China’s highly complex road conditions, including areas with no GPS signals.
The NGP is enabled by the P7’s strong underlying autonomous driving architecture, the most powerful system in production vehicles in China. It features 14 cameras, five millimetre-wave radars, 12 ultrasonic sensors, centimetre-level high-definition positioning, decimetre-level high-definition mapping, NVIDIA Xavier system-on-the-chip computing platform, and Bosch iBooster brake system.
Currently, the XPeng P7 is China’s only mass-production car with a 360-degree dual camera and radar fusion perception system for added safety.
