Xpeng Claims First L3 Autonomous BEV
Chinese BEV maker Xpeng has claimed its Level 3 driverless technology is the country’s first market ready system to hit the roads next year.
Its P7 executive performance model will boast the technology according to the announcement made Dr Xinzhou Wu, vice-president of Xpeng’s autonomous driving at Nvidia GTC China 2019 in Suzhou. The car will be the first to employ the Nvidia Drive AGX Xavier system-on-a-chip (SoC) autonomous driving platform.
The system also employs Qualcomm’s vehicle processor Snapdragon 820A, along with a suite of cameras, including in-cabin camera, radars, HD-map and ultrasonic sensors. It claims to be the first production vehicle to carry next-generation millimeter wave radar with enhanced field of view and increased bandwidth, along with increased detection distance and angular accuracy. The P7’s positioning module has HD map resolution reaching decimeter level, with a relative positioning accuracy < 0.3%.
All these system are bundled into the automaker’s XPilot autonomous function which has already been through two generations of upgrades. The latest claims Level 3 ability, including autonomous driving on highways, full-proprietary synergetic sensor capability and AI-based intelligent cockpit, all in next year’s production vehicles. Xpeng further claims that by 2021, XPilot 3.5 will be able to perform full-scenario highway autonomous driving, upgradeable later via OTA updates.
Wu said: “Xpeng Motors is the first and only Chinese automaker to have end-to-end closed-loop R&D capability for autonomous driving and the only Chinese company that has built its proprietary synergetic sensor capability. We believe that having a central computing platform is key to autonomous driving solutions. The more scalable the system is, the more efficient for future data, mapping and upgrading via OTA updates.”
— Paul Myles is a seasoned automotive journalist based in London. Follow him on Twitter @Paulmyles_
