XPeng flew a Mashable reporter to China to ride in a car most Americans will never legally buy. The P7 is the sedan from XPeng, a company often compared to Tesla because it is chasing the same mix of self-driving software, humanoid robots, and even a flying-car division. The point of the trip was the carmaker's new driver-assistance system, VLA 2.0, which stands for Vision Language Action. The reporter activated it with two pulls on the right stalk, watched a blue ring appear on the display to confirm autonomous mode, and let the car thread its own way through city traffic. Chinese rules require hands on the wheel throughout, and the system nudges the driver if they let go, but the car did the steering.
What makes VLA worth a closer look is the approach behind the name. A vision-language-action model is the same broad end-to-end strategy Tesla moved toward with recent versions of Full Self-Driving, where a single neural network turns camera input into driving decisions rather than stacking hand-written rules for each scenario. XPeng is betting on that generalization to handle the messy parts of driving. China also does something the US does not: it requires cars in autonomous mode to emit a blue exterior light so nearby drivers know the computer is in charge, on top of the hands-on mandate. There is no national US equivalent for either signal, which is one more reason the two regulatory environments are diverging about as fast as the hardware is.
A few smaller details fill out the picture. The P7 pairs the self-driving system with a heads-up display that projects upcoming turns and a rear camera view onto the windscreen, though the reporter found the central screen easier to read in practice and expected the projection to feel more natural as buyers get used to it. Speed can be trimmed up or down with a scroll wheel on the steering wheel, and small manual corrections hand control back to the car the moment the driver lets go again. None of this is exotic by the standard of a high-end Western EV, which is the point worth sitting with. The hardware and interface are familiar. The differentiator XPeng is pushing is the software's willingness to drive itself in conditions most systems would simply refuse.
The test itself was deliberately hard. The driver turned down a narrow road packed with pedestrians and scooters, and the car slowed for people who stepped in front of it, but a human took over twice: once in a tight squeeze past a parked car, and once at a pole with a stopped car blocking the path. An XPeng engineer frames the core challenge as corner cases, the rare and weird situations that resist training, and says the problem is not too little data but too many unusual scenarios to solve one at a time. The reporter also watched the P7 hunt for and take a parking spot on its own, including parking with nobody inside, and got a demo of XPeng's personal flying machine, which launches from a six-wheel hybrid carrier vehicle and is limited by Chinese rules to roughly 200 approved parks.
Bottom line: Two takeovers on one short, hostile street is not a system you stop watching, and nobody is claiming otherwise. But the more interesting story here is access, not autonomy. US tariffs and the ban on Chinese vehicle software mean this car and its self-driving stack are not coming to American roads, so the only way most US buyers will judge XPeng is through videos like this one. If you want to know what the competition actually looks like, this is the window, and it is a narrow one by design.