China’s EV war: Xpeng’s P5 electric car can now read traffic lights as it tops JD Power’s survey in outsmarting Tesla
- In a video shared on China’s social media, Xpeng’s P5 made two automatic lane changes with voice-over assistance and merged into the left lane
- The vehicle then read the traffic lights correctly, making adjustments to its movements, in a demonstration of the vehicle’s 32 perception sensors
The Navigation Guided Pilot (NGP) highway solutions, now available on Xpeng’s P7 sedan, will be expanded to cover city-level scenarios for the new P5 sedan, where two of six versions equipped with LIDAR. The NGP includes features that give a real-time readout of traffic lights across China’s urban cities, according to a video circulated on China’s social media.
In the video, the P5 made two automatic lane changes with voice-over assistance and merged into the left lane. The vehicle was then able to recognise the green light at an intersection, passing through it before the light turned red, in a demonstration of the vehicle’s 32 perception sensors in action.
Chinese EV makers are “a little bit ahead of other competitors, especially traditional carmakers in piloting” and in autonomous driving features such as those found in robo-taxis, said Yale Zhang, managing director of Shanghai-based consultancy Automotive Foresight, who counts General Motors’ Buick Velite 6 plug-in hybrid electric car among the three vehicles he owns. “All of the systems are developed by these EV start-ups or by new tier-one technology companies.”
The technologies covered in the survey included remote parking, over-the-air (OTA) updates for vehicle software, touch or facial identification and intelligent voice assistance, according to JD Power.
