After recently receiving approval to test its new P7 electric sedan in the US, XPeng Motors has officially announced the EV will roll out in China on April 27, 2020.
The P7 sedan will be the company’s first ‘intelligent’ EV, and will be powered by the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX platform, which features a high performance energy efficient Xavier system-on-a-chip (SoC). If you’re thinking NVIDIA sounds familiar, it is the computer chip that was used by Tesla before they created their own, commonly referred to as HW3.0.
The luxury EV will bring several autonomous driving firsts for Chinese customers. It will come equipped with 12 ultrasonic sensors, five high-precision millimeter-wave radars, 13 autonomous driving cameras, plus one in-car camera with HD map and high-precision positioning that will allow it have autonomous driving functions for highways, urban roads, and valet parking.
XPeng claims the Xavier SoC can deliver 30 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of performance while consuming only 30 watts of power, allowing it to have the redundancy and diversity necessary for highly automated and autonomous driving systems.
“Our successful collaboration with NVIDIA was critical to the development and production of our P7,” said Dr. Xinzhou Wu, vice president of autonomous driving at Xpeng. “Backed by the performance and energy efficiency of Xavier, we’ve been able to accelerate and outpace our peers in the creation of this safe, intelligent, feature-rich sedan–at a price point that makes it an ideal solution in today’s highly competitive EV market.”
Backed by this technology, the P7 also has impressive range. The electric sedan was recently verified by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) to have a maximum driving range of 706km (438 miles), based on the NEDC cycle. For comparison, the NEDC cycle rates the Tesla Model 3 at 668 km (414 miles), some 5% less than the P7.
When released, the P7 will carry a retail price between ¥240,000 ($49,600 CAD) and ¥370,000 ($76,500 CAD). The company announced in November it had already amassed more than 15,000 pre-orders.
