Xpeng’s robotaxi now has permission to roam all of Guangzhou. The Chinese EV maker said on Monday, Oct. 26 that its robotaxi unit, Xpeng Yoyo (小鹏悠游), has received Guangzhou’s qualification for intelligent connected vehicle demonstration operations, which lets it run Level 4 robotaxi trial service across the entire city. There’s a catch, though. You’ll still need an invite code.
The approval moves Xpeng’s robotaxi “from technology validation further toward operations and business-model validation,” the company said, as reported by the Shanghai Securities News and Sina Tech. Financial wire Cailian Press had the news first, citing Xpeng’s official Weibo account, and called it an important milestone for the commercialization of Xpeng’s “physical AI.”
Invite codes first, the whole city later
Candice Yuan, who heads the robotaxi business, said on Weibo that access will keep opening gradually through invitation codes during the first phase, expanding the service area “while ensuring safety,” CnEVPost reports. Riders book through a WeChat mini program called “小鹏YOYO自动驾驶.” People without a code can apply and wait. Until now, operations have centered on core districts such as Tianhe, according to Chinese auto site 汽车视点 (Auto Viewpoint), and Shenzhen already shows up in the app’s city list, though it’s marked as outside the service area.
So the “citywide” part is a license, not a launch. What changes is what Xpeng can now learn. Sina Tech put it plainly: driving the car is only one link. Order response, dispatch, pickups, service flow and handling the unexpected all have to work together before a robotaxi becomes a business.
A vision-only bet that sounds familiar
Here’s where Tesla fans will lean in. Xpeng’s robotaxi is built on its flagship GX SUV and engineered to L4 standards with a camera-based approach that uses neither lidar nor high-definition maps. It carries four of Xpeng’s in-house Turing AI chips, good for 3,000 TOPS of effective computing power, and driving decisions come from Xpeng’s second-generation Vision-Language-Action model, VLA 2.0. That’s the same Turing chip family Volkswagen now uses in the Xpeng-powered ID. UNYX 09.
The timeline has moved quickly:
- January: road-testing permit in Guangzhou.
- March: a dedicated robotaxi division.
- May: the first production robotaxi rolls off the line.
- July: first internal ride, with CEO He Xiaopeng as the passenger.
- Oct. 8: the Xpeng Yoyo brand and the booking mini program launch, after more than 2,200 employee rides.
- Oct. 26: citywide L4 demonstration-operation approval.
He Xiaopeng said in August that Xpeng had built a cloud-based remote takeover platform and wants to run passenger service without safety drivers in 2027. Xpeng also doesn’t plan to run a fleet itself in the long run. It wants to supply the vehicle platform, driving software and AI to ride-hailing partners in China and abroad, earning money from vehicle sales, technology services and a share of ride revenue.
How it stacks up
Tesla is further down the same road. Its Texas robotaxi roster has reached 970 vehicles, and over the weekend more than 50 driverless Cybercabs ferried fans to the F1 race in Austin. Inside China, Baidu’s Apollo Go, Pony.ai and WeRide already run paid driverless rides in several cities. Xpeng is late to that party, but it arrives with its own chips, its own model and a production SUV it can build at scale, and China’s regulators are clearly widening the lane for automated driving this fall.
For Japan, where Level 4 service is still limited to small pilot zones, Guangzhou is another reminder of how fast the bar is moving next door. Xpeng says its 2027 plans include overseas partners. Which ones, and where, it hasn’t said.
Sources: 上海证券报 (Shanghai Securities News) via Sina Finance, 新浪科技 (Sina Tech), 财联社 (Cailian Press), 汽车视点, CnEVPost.
— The EVX News team
Featured image: An XPeng GX, the SUV Xpeng’s robotaxi is built on, in China. Photo: JustAnotherCarDesigner, via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 (cropped).
