- XPeng Inc. (NYSE: XPEV) announced it is unveiling the beta version of its NGP (Navigation Guided Pilot) highway autonomous driving solution this week in a series of media road tests in Guangzhou. These are the details.
XPeng Inc. (NYSE: XPEV) — a leading Chinese smart electric vehicle company — announced it is unveiling the beta version of its NGP (Navigation Guided Pilot) highway autonomous driving solution this week in a series of media road tests in Guangzhou. And Xpeng plans to launch the widely anticipated NGP function — a key part of its XPILOT 3.0 autonomous driving package — to customers in China in the next few weeks.
XPeng’s NGP highway navigation function conducts automatic navigation assisted driving from point A to B, based on navigation routes set by the driver. And upon launching, it will be implemented on the Premium version of the XPeng P7 with the XPILOT 3.0 system. With more than a million kilometers of road tests, the NGP covers a wider range of driving scenarios and situations with a higher lane change success rate, and lower driver intervention requirement, than similar functions in other models on the market.
The NGP beta version was well received by more than 100 journalists who participated in the test drives in China this week. And currently, the XPeng P7 is China’s only mass production car with 360-degree dual camera and radar fusion perception system for added safety. The new NGP function is going to make highway driving a safer, smoother, easier, and more pleasant experience by automatically performing speed limit adjustment, automatic switching to highways, optimized lane choices, automatic entering and exiting ramps, and automatic overtaking.
XPeng’s NGP solution was specifically created and tailored for China’s complex driving environment. And its full-scenario high-definition positioning capability solves HD-map positioning challenges for China’s highly complex road conditions, including areas with no GPS signals. Plus it can identify and avoid traffic cones, warn of difficult situations such as construction sites or road toll entrances, follow on automatically in traffic jams, avoid breakdown vehicles, change lanes for avoiding emergencies, avoid large trucks, and warn drivers of when to resume manual control in dangerous situations like adverse weather or road accidents.
This is enabled with the P7’s underlying autonomous driving architecture — which features 14 cameras, 5 millimeter-wave radars, 12 ultrasonic sensors, centimeter-level high-definition positioning, decimeter-level AutoNavi high-definition mapping, NVIDIA Xavier system-on-the-chip computing platform, and the Bosch iBooster brake system.
The NGP highway solution is going to be launched via an OTA (over-the-air) upgrade to XPeng customers in China before the Chinese New Year in February.
