Xpeng has often been called the Tesla of China and yet again it is flexing its muscles as it has launched the G9 SUV which will be its flagship model. The electric SUV will hit the Chinese market in October and will have a 480-kW architecture which means it can according to Xpeng have 200 km of range in 5 minutes of charging.
It will be offered in two variants -- a single motor rear-wheel drive model that has 313 bhp and a dual motor model that gets 543 bhp. Xpeng even claims that it can do a 0-100 kmph sprint in just 3.9 seconds and has a top speed of 200 kmph.
Battery options are rather limited as there is only one 96 kWh battery that claims to provide 702 km of range as per the Chinese standard. Now for an SUV, this is an exceptional range, but the Chinese standard is known not to be as accurate or stringent as the EPA in the US or the WLTP standard in Europe.
Xpeng like Tesla is building out its network of fast chargers which can support the 480-kW charging architecture and 0-80 per cent charge times are said to happen in just 15 minutes. The GP also gets a huge boot which has 660 litres of storage space, and the interior is as impressive as the exterior.
There are two large 14.96-inch displays and a small digital instrument cluster. These screens use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 chipset which should mean they are as responsive as high-end smartphones.
The price of the vehicle is expected to start around $75,000 -- but you get a lot like a 29-speaker sound system that can create a 5D sound field, heated seats on the front and back, soundproofing, a smart voice assistant and a massage function on all seats.
Xpeng uses a LiDAR and 31 sensors and cameras to make the car spatial aware. It connects to 5G networks in China and will in the future get the Navigation Guided Pilot NGP which is basically its equivalent of Tesla’s autopilot self-driving function.
