I reviewed the G6 Performance recently and called it a smartphone on wheels. Two huge screens, the best driver assistance I've tested, speakers good enough to keep you in the carpark for one more song.
The Air is that game ported to a smaller console. It looks the same and plays the same. A few effects have been turned down to hit the target, and the target here is Cat A.
Singapore's Cat A COE caps a car at 110 kW. XPENG's answer was to take the 68.5 kWh G6 and limit the motor to exactly that. Same body, same wheelbase, same 571-litre boot, same 15.6-inch screen. The 0 to 100 time goes from 4.1 seconds on the Performance to 9.6, and that's the number this whole review keeps coming back to.
Tech and software
I expected the cuts to show up here first. They mostly don't.
The Air runs a MediaTek chip in place of the Qualcomm Snapdragon in the Pro. I went looking for lag and found none. Menus open instantly, the map scrolls cleanly, and the voice assistant still understands Singaporean English from all four seats. If nobody told you about the chip, you'd never guess.
XCombo, the macro builder I went on about in the Performance review, is here in full. So is the community store of ready-made combos, so is auto parking, and so is the app.
The bigger cut is under the skin: five cameras and four radars against 12 cameras and five radars on the Pro. XPENG says this makes the lane centring a little less refined. I ran XPILOT on the expressway and in slow traffic, which is where most of us actually use it, and it was as calm and confident as it was on the Performance. No wandering, no phantom braking. If the difference is there, I never found it.
You do lose the rear traffic on the instrument cluster. The little 3D world now shows only what's ahead and beside you. And the rearview mirror is plain glass rather than the Pro's camera feed.
Interior quality
Coming straight out of the Pro, I spotted the differences in about a minute. An hour later I'd stopped noticing them.
The seats are vegan leather rather than Nappa. They're still ventilated, still heated, still ten-way adjustable with lumbar. The 256-colour ambient lighting stays. The floating console stays. The two 50W wireless charging pads stay.
And the Xopera sound system stays, all 18 speakers and 960 watts of it. This surprised me most. It's the single most expensive-feeling thing in the car and XPENG left it alone.
Same screens, same speakers, same driver aids. The only thing XPENG really took out is the shove, and you'll miss it more than the brochure lets on.
The drive
Here's what the S$46,000 buys the other guy.
Off the line it's fine. There's 440 Nm of torque, so you still leave most of the lights ahead of the pack and it never feels sluggish in town. But roll onto the throttle at 60 and ask for more, and you feel the limit. The Performance surged. The Air needs a moment, then gets there. On paper it's a five-second gap to the car I drove last time. From the driver's seat it feels bigger, because 2,065 kg is a lot for 110 kW to shift.
The ride is still on the firm side, and it still has that slightly floaty feel over undulations that kept me from calling the Performance a driver's car. Steering is light, accurate and quiet about what the front tyres are doing.
None of that matters much on the roads this car will live on. In daily traffic it's quiet and easy, and I never once wished for a sportier setting. I did wish for more power, most days, at least once.
Living with it in Singapore
XPENG's website headlines 612 km for the Air. That's the WLTP city figure. The combined number is 470 km, and that's the one to plan around.
You'll beat it. At 83% the car showed 398 km remaining, which works out to roughly 480 km on a full charge. The trip computer read 12.2 kWh/100 km over my time with it, against XPENG's claimed 16.9. On the Performance I saw 13.4 against 18.4, so this seems to be a G6 habit.
Charging peaks at 382 kW on DC, down from 451 on the Pro, with XPENG claiming 10 to 80% in 12 minutes for both. No charger in Singapore can test that yet, and I didn't charge the car during the loan, so that claim stands as XPENG's for now. AC is 11 kW, which does an overnight fill at home without fuss.
The boot and the back seat are exactly as big as they were in the Pro, which is to say enormous. The aircon holds a cold cabin through the worst of the afternoon. It's a very easy car to live with.
The verdict
The Air is S$17,000 under the Pro Long Range on the list price and S$46,000 under the Performance. Stack XPENG's bundle on all three and it's S$15,000 and S$44,000.
For that money you give up power, a bit of battery, seven cameras, Nappa and a camera mirror. You keep the screens, the software, the speakers, the driver assistance and the space. That's a very good trade for most people, and if your budget or your COE category says Cat A, there's nothing in the category that touches it on tech.
If you can stretch to the Pro Long Range, the extra 108 kW fixes the one thing I'd change. But I haven't driven that car yet, so I'll say it on paper only. You can line all three up against the rest of the market in our compare tool.
Clever, plush, limited. I'd happily drive one every day. I just wouldn't look forward to overtaking.
We've put the Air and the Performance head to head, round by round: Air or Performance?