Who is XPENG?

Guangzhou, 2004. A phone in China does not have apps. It has a tiny screen, a numeric keypad and a data plan priced like a luxury. If you want the web on it, every page has to be squeezed through a straw. Two engineers in a small office decide that the straw is the business.

Their product was UC Browser, and if you have ever used a cheap phone in Asia you have probably used it. It compressed web pages on a server before sending them to the handset, which made the internet usable on hardware that had no business running it. It became one of the most-used mobile browsers on Earth, with hundreds of millions of users across China and India, on phones that Western tech companies had written off. One of those two engineers was He Xiaopeng.²³

From the browser to the car

Ten years later, in June 2014, Alibaba bought UCWeb outright. It was reported at the time as the biggest merger in the history of the Chinese internet. He became a very rich man, took a senior job at Alibaba running its mobile business, and by his own telling, got restless almost immediately.²³

The restlessness had a shape. 2014 was the year Tesla opened its patents and the Model S started turning up in Chinese cities. He looked at it and saw what he had seen in 2004: a computer that everyone would eventually own, in a form nobody had built properly yet. He has said he pitched the idea of building cars inside Alibaba and got nowhere. So he put his own money into a startup instead.³

The startup already had engineers. Xia Heng and He Tao had come from GAC, Guangzhou's state carmaker, and founded the company in August 2014 with He as backer. It was named Xiaopeng Motors after him, which tells you how the relationship was going to go. In August 2017 he quit Alibaba, took the chairman's seat full time, and XPENG stopped being a side project.³⁴

Borrowing a factory

Building a car company from a browser fortune has one immediate problem: you do not have a factory, and in China you also need a licence to make cars.

The largest car company in Europe was buying engineering from a firm younger than some of its model lines.

XPENG's solution for its first car was to borrow both. Haima is a small carmaker from Hainan that had once built Mazdas under licence and had drifted, by the late 2010s, to the edge of the industry. It had a plant in Zhengzhou and not much to put through it. XPENG's G3, a compact electric SUV, was assembled there from 2018. At one point during the pandemic the G3 was the only car Haima was building at all.⁵⁶

The G3 itself made its debut at CES in Las Vegas in January 2018, among televisions and fridges with Wi-Fi. That was the whole message. XPENG wanted to be judged as a tech company that happened to make cars.⁶

The P7 gave it a face

The second car was the one people remember. The P7 was a low, long saloon with a single strip of light across its nose, and it looked like a car designed by people who had opinions. XPENG built it at its own new plant in Zhaoqing from May 2020, the first car it made under its own roof. In August that year the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.⁷⁸

The P7 also settled an argument. Plenty of carmakers talked about over-the-air updates and then delivered new map tiles. In the P7, almost every electronic module could be rewritten from a server, so the car got measurably better while it sat in the owner's carpark. That is what people mean when they call XPENG a software company.⁷

When Volkswagen came calling

For forty years, foreign carmakers entered China by teaching a local partner how to build cars. In July 2023 the direction reversed. Volkswagen agreed to pay roughly US$700 million for about five per cent of XPENG and to develop two Volkswagen-badged electric cars for China on XPENG's platform and software. The largest car company in Europe was buying engineering from a firm younger than some of its model lines.¹⁹

That is the sentence to remember when someone at a dinner party asks if XPENG is a real car company.

A pop-up on the way to work

One morning in July 2024, people walking to work through Raffles Place found an electric SUV parked inside the lobby of UOB Plaza 2, surrounded by screens, with staff in polo shirts explaining what an 800-volt architecture was. That was Singapore's introduction to XPENG. Not a showroom on Leng Kee Road: a pop-up in the middle of the financial district, on the assumption that the people who would buy a G6 were the people walking past it at lunch.¹⁰

The company behind the pop-up was XPremium BEV, a subsidiary of Premium Automobiles. Premium is not a new name. It has been Audi's retail partner in Singapore since 1999, with the big showroom at the junction of Alexandra and Leng Kee. When Audi moved to selling direct through its own House of Progress in 2025, Premium kept the aftersales business and went looking for new brands. It found two Chinese ones: XPENG and Zeekr. So the people servicing XPENGs here have spent a quarter of a century servicing Audis.¹⁰¹¹¹²

A proper flagship showroom followed in November 2024, and in January 2025 the Singapore Motorshow got the first right-hand-drive X9, a seven-seat MPV over 5.2 metres long with rear-wheel steering and a third row that folds itself away.¹²¹³

What it is like to live with one

We have lived with the G6 Performance. It is the calmest, most technically complete car we have had on test, a smartphone on wheels that would rather cradle you than thrill you. The software is a generation ahead of most of what is sold here, and the cabin is a class above its price. It is not a driver's car and it does not pretend to be.¹⁴

That is the whole company in one car. In 2004 He Xiaopeng looked at a phone that was not good enough for the internet and fixed the internet instead. Twenty years later he looked at cars the same way. The G6 does not ask to be driven hard. It asks to be used, every day, like the browser on the cheap phone in your pocket. That was always the plan.