The first car off the line on Monday marks the start of a slow ramp. Public pilots arrive in the second half, fully driverless by early 2027.
XPeng said on Monday that the first robotaxi had rolled off its production line in Guangzhou, making the Chinese carmaker, in its own framing, the first automaker in China to begin mass production of a robotaxi developed entirely with in-house technology.
The vehicle is built on XPeng’s new GX platform and is engineered, according to the company, to support Level 4 autonomous driving from the factory floor rather than through aftermarket retrofits.
The headline is precise in a way that matters. XPeng is not the first company in China to put robotaxis on the road; Baidu’s Apollo Go runs more than 1,000 vehicles across 22 cities and is the country’s largest commercial operator, while Pony.ai’s fleet reached 1,446 vehicles by late March and is on track for 3,000 by year-end.
WeRide operates over 1,000 across more than 30 cities and 11 countries. What XPeng can claim is that it is the first traditional automaker, as opposed to a pure-play autonomous-driving company, to put a robotaxi-grade vehicle into series production in China.
That distinction is part marketing, part substance. The pure-play operators have, until now, retrofitted consumer vehicles, often Toyotas or domestic EVs, with sensor stacks and onboard compute supplied by the AV company.
XPeng’s GX-based robotaxi is the inverse: a vehicle designed from the platform up with the compute, drive-by-wire chassis, and redundancy required for Level 4 operation.
The car carries four of XPeng’s own Turing AI chips delivering a combined 3,000 TOPS of compute, a Bosch next-generation steer-by-wire system that eliminates the mechanical steering shaft, and what XPeng describes as aviation-grade redundancy across the safety-critical systems
. The software running on top is the company’s VLA 2.0 stack, a vision-language-action model that compresses end-to-end response latency to under 80 milliseconds.
Volume will be modest at first. Brian Gu, XPeng’s president, told Reuters last month that the company will likely produce hundreds to thousands of robotaxis over the next 12 to 18 months. Pilot operations with safety drivers begin in the second half of this year. Fully driverless commercial service is targeted for early 2027.
The robotaxi line in Guangzhou holds an intelligent-connected-vehicle road-testing licence, with L4 road tests already running on public roads.
The commercial logic is partly defensive. XPeng’s robotaxi push sits inside an aggressive 2026 diversification plan that also includes humanoid robots and a modular flying car, all powered by the same Turing silicon and the same vision-language-action software stack.
The company has been clear that the strategy is to monetise the AI stack across multiple form factors rather than rely on EV margins alone in a market where prices are falling and Chinese government subsidies have been wound back.
Volkswagen is the most visible external customer for that strategy. The German automaker, which took a 4.99% stake in XPeng for $700m in July 2023, named XPeng’s Turing chip and the VLA 2.0 system as its first external commercial customer this year. It is the first time a major Western carmaker has adopted Chinese-developed autonomous-driving software at this depth.
XPeng has indicated it is targeting roughly one million Turing chip shipments in 2026 and plans to open its robotaxi SDK to additional fleet operators over time.
The timing is awkward in one respect. Monday’s production-line milestone comes against a softer near-term backdrop. XPeng has guided first-quarter 2026 deliveries to 61,000–66,000 units, a year-on-year decline of roughly 30% that the company has attributed to reduced government subsidies and a longer Lunar New Year.
The company reports Q1 earnings on Wednesday. Its first-ever quarterly net profit, RMB 380m posted for Q4 2025, arrived alongside that softer Q1 guide.
It is also coming at a moment when the operational risks of large autonomous fleets have become more visible. In late March, more than 100 Baidu Apollo Go robotaxis froze mid-traffic in Wuhan in a correlated software failure, stranding passengers and surfacing a category of risk, simultaneous failure across a managed fleet, that conventional vehicle regulation was not designed for.
Pony.ai, despite reaching city-level profitability in Guangzhou, has had to contend with similar concerns as it scales. XPeng enters the same operating environment with a hardware advantage and a software stack it has built and tested itself, but it also enters as a software operator and not just as a manufacturer, with the same governance questions about fleet-scale failure modes that the existing players are still working through.
What XPeng has done this week is start the line. The first car has been built. The second-half pilots will test whether the platform performs in mixed traffic with a safety driver on board, and the early-2027 target will test whether the company can remove that driver.
Hundreds to thousands of units over 18 months is a deliberately modest ramp by the standards of Baidu and Pony, both of which are targeting fleets in the low thousands by the end of this year.
XPeng is betting that integration, owning the chip, the software, the platform, and the chassis, will produce a more reliable robotaxi than the retrofitted models that currently dominate the market.
