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.

Not just a car company

In November 2025 He Xiaopeng stood on a stage in Guangzhou and told the audience that XPENG was no longer a car company. It was, in his phrase, a "global embodied intelligence company". Behind him were a humanoid robot, a six-wheeled truck with an aircraft in its back, and a driverless taxi. The cars were almost a supporting act.¹⁵¹⁶

The truck is the one that gets the headlines. XPENG's flying-car arm, founded as AeroHT and since renamed Aridge, has spent years on a machine called the Land Aircraft Carrier: a six-wheel electric van that carries a two-seat electric aircraft in its cargo bay, drives to somewhere with open sky, unloads it, and lets you fly. The aircraft has six rotors, is designed to land safely with one out, and is flown with a single stick that XPENG says most people learn in minutes. A Guangzhou plant was built to make it. By 2026 the company was reporting more than 7,000 orders, a place on China's first fast-track list for certifying electric aircraft, close to a billion US dollars raised for the subsidiary, and deliveries planned for late in the year. Whether it ships on time is the kind of thing this site will report when it happens, not before.¹⁵¹⁷¹⁸

The robot is called IRON, and it exists because of the cars. The chips, the cameras and the AI models that drive an XPENG on the road were pointed at a body with 60 joints instead. The first version appeared in November 2024 and went to work inside XPENG's own factory. The second, a year later, runs on three of XPENG's in-house Turing chips and moves in a way that made people online accuse the company of hiding a person inside it, which XPENG answered by unzipping the skin on stage. The plan is not screwing bolts on a production line. It is greeters, showroom hosts and inspection rounds, with an industrial park in Guangzhou announced in early 2026 to build them at scale.¹⁵¹⁶¹⁸

Underneath both is the part that matters most for anyone buying the cars. XPENG designs its own AI chip, the Turing, and its own driving model, called VLA. The 2.0 version went into mass production in 2026 and, by XPENG's own measure, was handling more than half of assisted-driving mileage within a month of rolling out over the air. Three robotaxi models were announced for 2026, with staff testing in Guangzhou from July and He Xiaopeng taking the first end-to-end ride himself. Company-reported numbers, all of them, and we treat them as such. But the direction is not in doubt: the G6 in your carpark is running a smaller version of the same brain.¹⁶¹⁷¹⁸

The money says the same thing. XPENG delivered a record 429,445 cars in 2025, more than double the year before, and reported its first quarterly profit at the end of that year. It then set aside seven billion yuan for what it calls Physical AI in 2026 and said overseas deliveries had passed 20,000 in a single quarter for the first time. Singapore is a small dot on that map, but it is on the map.¹⁶¹⁷

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 treats the driving as the least interesting part. 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 The full G6 Performance review has the scores. We have since lived with the Cat A G6 Air as well, and put the two side by side in Air or Performance?

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, and now he is looking at robots and aircraft. 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.