Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer Xpeng is to launch a long-distance, navigation-assisted autonomous driving expedition, which will run from March 19 to 26 and is planned to cover a total distance of 3,675km across six provinces in China.
The company will test the performance of its recently released autonomous driving assistance function – Navigation Guided Pilot (NGP) – over 3,145km of highway driving, starting in Guangzhou in the south of China, all the way north to Beijing.
Xpeng P7 vehicles, equipped with Xpilot 3.0 which supports the NGP function, will be driven by members of the media and third parties during the seven-day expedition, claimed to be the longest driving challenge to date for an autonomous driving assistance function found in a mass-produced vehicle in China.
The company says that highway driving will be used to test key functions and the reliability of the NGP, including automatic highway ramp entering and exiting, automatic switching of highways and optimization of lane choices, automatic lane changing, overtaking and speed limit adjustment. The frequency of human driver intervention, and the success rate for the functions listed above, are among the key indicators to be tested in these sophisticated driving scenarios.
The fleet of P7s will drive across 10 Chinese cities in six provinces, starting in Guangzhou and then heading to Shantou, Quanzhou, Wenzhou, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Nanjing, Qingdao and Jinan, before finishing in Beijing. The team of media representatives and third-party experts will choose different highway routes based on their preferences, to cover a wide range of driving scenarios.