XPeng Begins Closed Beta of Factory-Built GX Robotaxi

This step validates XPeng's production-first, vision-only Level 4 approach, signaling a staged move toward manned pilots in H2 2026 and driverless service in early 2027.

Overview

On Thursday XPeng CEO He Xiaopeng completed the company's first end-to-end internal robotaxi ride in Guangzhou, marking the start of employee-only closed beta testing.
The robotaxi is a factory-built version of the GX SUV that entered production in Guangzhou in May and runs a vision-only stack driven by the VLA 2.0 model.
XPeng engineered the vehicle to SAE Level 4 standards and equips it with four in-house Turing AI chips totaling about 3,000 TOPS of onboard compute.
The company is pursuing a production-led commercial plan that targets under 200,000 yuan per vehicle, opens dispatch via Amap and a robotaxi SDK, and uses shared consumer hardware to cut fleet costs.
XPeng has set a safety-first, staged timeline supported by a new Robotaxi Business Unit and a 2026 AI R&D budget of about 7 billion yuan, with broader rollouts dependent on pilot results and generalization to new cities without HD maps.