XPeng earns L4 robotaxi demo licence across Guangzhou

XPeng has received approval to carry out L4-level robotaxi demonstration operations across Guangzhou, the Guangdong city where it is headquartered. The permit, issued under Guangzhou’s intelligent connected-vehicle demonstration programme, moves the company from closed-road testing into live-service trials that cover order handling, vehicle dispatch, passenger pickup, on-road incident response and the autonomous drive itself.

Access will open gradually through invitation codes at first, with the service area expanding over time as operations are validated.

Guangzhou is XPeng’s R&D and production base and the first market for its robotaxi commercialisation effort. Outside China, the company says it is in advanced discussions with several European mobility platforms, with the Guangzhou operation serving as the testbed for an eventual overseas deployment.

Technology supplier, not fleet owner

XPeng chairman and CEO He Xiaopeng has said the robotaxi business will be positioned as a technology supply model rather than a large-fleet operator. XPeng plans to provide vehicles, software and AI to partner mobility platforms, earning revenue from hardware sales, technology services and a share of the commission on booked trips.

Earlier this month the company named its robotaxi brand XPENG YOYO and opened public registration for its autonomous-driving service in China. The branding marks the first step towards a consumer-facing product after years of road-testing under a less publicised identity.

Hardware and software stack

The robotaxi platform uses four of XPeng’s own Turing AI chips, delivering a combined 3,000 TOPS of computing power. It runs XPeng’s VLA 2.0 (Vision-Language-Action) model, which the company says reuses the same software stack and models found in its production vehicles rather than relying on a heavily customised system built for each deployment city.

XPeng has emphasised that standardising on a single architecture is intended to keep development costs down and accelerate scaling, both domestically and in the European markets it is courting.