Kyle Conner arrived at the Beijing Auto Show, test drove Tesla FSD in China for 45 minutes, then climbed into an XPeng P7 Ultra to run the company's VLA 2.0 driver assistance system on public roads the same afternoon. The P7 Ultra is a performance sedan priced at around 300,000 RMB, roughly $42,000 USD, with 600 horsepower, peak charging at approximately 500 kW, and a vision-only sensor stack: cameras and radar but no lidar. Like Tesla, XPeng is betting that software and cameras scale better than adding expensive sensor hardware. The back-to-back comparison format makes this video worth watching for anyone trying to gauge where Chinese autonomy actually sits right now.
VLA 2.0 is XPeng's unified city and highway driver assistance system, branded NGP for navigation-guided pilot functions. The version tested here was pre-production, requiring an XPeng employee in the passenger seat as a legal supervisor, and it was not yet publicly available in China at the time of filming. The system uses cameras and radar without lidar, placing XPeng in a small group alongside Tesla that is pursuing a pure vision approach. Huawei's ADS system, which runs on dense lidar arrays, is the other major player in China and is widely considered more aggressive and precise. Kyle had driven Huawei's system previously and came into this test using it as the benchmark.
The drive covered urban Beijing streets, a village road section, and open highway. Initial impressions were cautious: the system tried to follow a wrong car out of a parking area at the start. Once on public roads it improved noticeably. It handled unmarked narrow lanes, heavy scooter traffic, and unprotected turns with smooth, measured inputs. Kyle noted the system never felt hesitant in the way an earlier version of NGP did a year prior, when he needed to intervene frequently. He counted roughly five takeovers during the FSD session earlier in the day; VLA 2.0 required far fewer. The car's torque-sensing steering wheel and comfortable suspension tuning added to an overall impression of a system that has matured quickly over 12 months.
Bottom line: VLA 2.0 is not quite at Huawei ADS levels yet, but it is a meaningful step beyond where XPeng was a year ago and, on these roads at this moment, Kyle judged it ahead of the version of FSD currently running in China. That is a credible result and worth tracking as XPeng continues to update the software.