You may not have heard the name before, but if you're at all interested in 21st century transport then ambitious Chinese EV-maker Xpeng should definitely be on your radar – pun intended.
Far from being content playing in just the automotive space, it's in the process of branching out into the more futuristic fields of electric aircraft and robotics.
The company holds an annual product and technology showcase in Guangzhou, dubbed AI Day, which this year took place on 5 November under the general theme of ‘Emergence’. A big focus was on its development of AI systems designed to interact directly with the physical world – in cars, robots and aircraft, for example.
The core announcement was VLA 2.0 — a vision-to-action AI model that turns camera input straight into control output, which Xpeng claims allows for faster responses, especially when compared to the language-in-the-loop reasoning seen in most competing AI.
At the event, Xpeng also teased three new robotaxis, demoed a humanoid robot and previewed a tiltrotor hybrid aircraft. We also got updates on previous announcements, and confirmation that the Land Aircraft Carrier (which we loved the look of when we first spied it as a concept in 2023) is nearing mass production.
In Australia and the UK, Xpeng recently launched the G6 SUV EV, while the larger G9 SUV is coming soon. Xpeng hasn’t yet entered the US EV market, so most people will probably know the brand for its flying car projects and CES demos.
An eye on the skies
Xpeng expects small scale aircraft to become a major new industry in China, and its flying-vehicle arm, Aridge, is building two options specifically for this market. The Land Aircraft Carrier is a mobile, self contained system designed for short flights with two people, while the A868 full tiltrotor hybrid aircraft is aimed at efficient multi-passenger travel over longer ranges – so basically, a flying car. Together, they are designed to create a futuristic transport system that can handle everything from business use to tourism.
Xpeng's A868 tiltrotor aircraft: yep, it's basically a flying car
Unveiled at AI Day 2025, the A868 uses a tiltrotor setup on Xpeng’s “Kunpeng Super Extended-Range Architecture” with a self-developed “aviation-grade hybrid-electric core”. To explain, the “Kunpeng Super Extended-Range Architecture” means the A868 operates like a hybrid car, with an internal combustion engine and generator that charges the battery and supplies power to the electric motors. Importantly, this setup helps reduce the range and turnaround limits of purely electric aircraft.
The A868 is designed as a 6-seat aircraft with about 500 km (310 miles) of range and up to 360 km/h (224 mph) cruise speed, with the program now in what the company calls a critical stage of flight verification.
Xpeng also highlighted the practicality of the design, and says the A868 is intended to lift off and land from compact sites instead of relying on runways, and that it can use takeoff and landing areas as small as half a basketball court. This means it can target markets currently served by helicopters, and use existing infrastructure such as helipads.
Your own private... aircraft carrier?
The Land Aircraft Carrier, first announced in 2023, is not far off mass production and Xpeng says it’s received over 7,000 global orders for the $280,000 / £214,000 / AU$430,000 vehicle. The Carrier pairs a six-wheel hybrid-electric carrier with a small two-person electric copter. The flying air module has six lift motors and docks on the carrier for terrestrial transport and fast charging, with up to six flights possible per outing. The copter has a range of 20 km and flight times up to 20 minutes – enough to suit short scenic hops or point-to-point business use.
Xpeng says the cockpit controls are designed to be easy to learn, with a single stick that handles the main control. The vehicle has integrated backups across its power, batteries, flight control and communications systems, so one can cover another if something goes wrong. The flying module also has a safety mode that can still bring it down for a controlled landing even if two of its six motors (provided they’re on opposite corners) stop working.
To support production scale, Aridge’s dedicated plant began trial production on the 3rd of November, with the first Land Aircraft Carrier officially rolling off the line. Xpeng describes it as the first flying-car factory to use a modern automotive-style assembly line, targeting 5,000 units per year at first, but then scaling up to 10,000 at full capacity — that’s one aircraft every 30 minutes.
The announced commercialization plans start with a tourism route in China’s northwest — a low-altitude self-driving tourism route in 2026, marketed as a “self-driving flight” experience that adds scenic flying to established cultural itineraries.
While flying cars often feel like a sci-fi dream – something that’s perpetually off in the far future – Xpeng’s approach with the A868 and the Land Aircraft Carrier is quite practical and realistic, even if the timelines still seem quite ambitious. Based on the number of global orders it’s received though, a hybrid tiltrotor for longer business-class hops (where speed and range matter), and a simpler flight experience platform (tuned for tourism and shorter flights) seem to have broad appeal.
Xpeng's vision-to-action AI model levels up
The underlying thread in practically all of Xpeng’s vehicles and robots is VLA 2.0, an AI model that uses ‘vision-to-action’. Instead of converting camera input into written language and then using that to decide which actions to take, it goes straight from pixels to outputs to control driving or robotic manipulation.
For cars, Xpeng says it trained the AI on about 100 million videos and now runs a distilled model with billions of parameters; comparatively, rivals generally use models with only tens of millions of parameters.
Cars and mobile robots don’t have endless power and cooling to supply data-center levels of compute, so the more efficient ‘vision-to-action’ is a solid choice for getting the system up and running now.
If you’re keen to know more about Xpeng’s VLA 2.0 AI model, I’ve covered it in more depth on our sister site, TechRadar.
Robotaxis join the ranks
While the VLA 2.0 AI system will be used in passenger cars for supervised self-driving, at AI Day 2025 Xpeng also teased us with an announcement about three new robotaxis it’s building. They use the same VLA 2.0 AI model, but will operate in fully driverless autonomous mode in defined zones.
This is equivalent to SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) Level 4 automation, which has been achieved by companies such as Waymo, but only on comparatively sensor-packed robot taxis. Xpeng’s Robotaxi platform keeps the company’s pure vision approach and hardware capable of up to 3,000 TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second, a common way to measure performance of AI hardware) of processing power. Xpeng says it will use what it learns from passenger cars to fast-track the validation process of the Robotaxis, with a planned pilot program and then mass-production goal of 2026.
While this is another ambitious timeline, using the same core hardware and software as retail cars would seem to be a sensible choice that should help lower costs, improve testing scale and get Robotaxis operating sooner.
A different kind of Iron Man
Iron is Xpeng’s next-generation humanoid built with a humanlike frame: bionic spine, flexible skin and 82 separate ways (known as ‘degrees of freedom’) that its joints can move across the neck, arms, hands, torso and legs. The hands offer more joints than many rivals, and aim for fine manipulation so the robot can slot into existing jobs currently done by humans without new tooling.
Under the shell, three AI models work together. VLA (vision-language-action), VLT (vision-language-task) and VLM (vision-language model) handle interaction, walking and task control. Processing stays on the robot using hardware rated at 2,250 TOPS, keeping latency low and private data local.
Full specs are still to come, but Xpeng is aiming for large-scale mass production by late 2026, and suggested that jobs the bot could perform early on include tasks like guided tours, retail assistance and back-office logistics.
Want to know more? You can watch Xpeng's full AI Day 2025 presentation below:
Xpeng's aggressive testing and production timeline
- 2026: Robotaxi city pilot program using only camera vision.
- 2026: Iron robots on sale, mass-production target late 2026.
- 2026: Land Aircraft Carrier mass production.
- 2026: Dunhuang low-altitude tourist flight route launches.
- 2026: A868 flight verification expands.
- 2027: Middle East retail sales start for the Land Aircraft Carrier.
