When XPENG invited me to China for a four-day press trip spanning Guangzhou and Beijing, I’ll admit my expectations were mixed. Bold claims about self-driving tech from a Chinese EV brand—that I’d heard before. A flying car was something else entirely.
I was joined by around 100 journalists, content creators, and influencers from across the globe, which told me immediately that XPENG was playing for an international audience. This wasn’t a domestic launch dressed up with a few foreign faces.
What followed over those four days rearranged my thinking in ways I didn’t expect. Here’s why.
XPENG covered the cost of travel, accommodation, and meals for this trip. As always, editorial decisions—including the opinions expressed in this article—remain entirely my own.
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Arriving in Guangzhou: first impressions
China isn’t what most Westerners expect
I flew from Newcastle in the U.K. to Guangzhou via Dubai, landing late at night on April 20th. Even at that hour, a city of 19 million people in southern China’s Pearl River Delta doesn’t let you ignore it.
One of the things that surprised me most, and continued to throughout the trip, was how clean everything was—Beijing in particular was immaculate. The shopping malls there were genuinely extraordinary: multi-story complexes filled with Western brands, electrical shops stocking the latest gadgets, and even car showrooms sitting alongside the usual retail mix.
The people were equally disarming. Despite an inevitable language barrier—English isn’t widely spoken—everyone I encountered was genuinely welcoming and hospitable, and I got on far better than I’d expected.
Practical tip: do your digital homework before you fly
Before leaving, I researched what traveling in China actually involves from a tech perspective, and I’m glad I did. There are no Google services, no WhatsApp, and no access to most Western apps without a VPN—I downloaded one on both my iPhone and MacBook beforehand, and it worked reasonably well throughout.
China is also almost entirely cashless, and foreign cards aren’t always accepted, so I set up AliPay ahead of time. I also downloaded WeChat for messaging, Google Translate for day-to-day communication, and AMap for navigation—all of them essential, and all worth sorting before you board the plane.
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XPENG’s HQ: a campus built around Physical AI
A showroom where a humanoid robot greets you at the door
After collecting my temporary Chinese driving license on the morning of the 21st—a requirement for any driving during the trip—we headed to XPENG’s flagship AI Mobility Experience Center at the company’s Global Headquarters in Guangzhou’s Tianhe Smart City. The 3.9 million-square-foot campus features corporate showrooms, autonomous driving displays, and a dedicated flying car exhibition.
What stops you in your tracks, though, is IRON—XPENG’s humanoid robot, deployed on the showroom floor to greet visitors, demonstrate vehicles, and assist with sales. Standing 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighing around 154 pounds, with over 60 joints, 200 degrees of freedom, and dexterous hands with 22 degrees of freedom each, it moves with a fluidity that doesn’t feel like a gimmick. XPENG plans to have IRON working as a sales assistant in its retail stores by Q1 2027.
This is what XPENG means by Physical AI
IRON runs on the same underlying AI architecture as XPENG’s cars and flying vehicles—the VLA 2.0 foundation model that powers the company’s self-driving system, its robotaxi fleet, and the ARIDGE flying car. The idea is a single AI brain running across multiple physical platforms, from vehicles to humanoids.
It’s an ambitious concept, and seeing it in the flesh—quite literally—makes it feel considerably less abstract.
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Inside XPENG’s factories
A car production line run almost entirely by robots
Day two continued with factory tours. Inside one of XPENG’s car manufacturing facilities, what struck me immediately was how few humans were present on the production floor. Welding, component movement, and assembly are handled almost entirely by robots, with people appearing mainly at the end of the line to carry out quality checks.
It’s a vast, precise, quietly impressive operation—and it sets the tone for how XPENG approaches building things.
The flying car factory is in a category of its own
From there, we moved to the ARIDGE facility, where XPENG manufactures its flying car. The company has blended automotive production techniques with methods borrowed directly from the aerospace industry, creating a production line that doesn’t sit neatly in either category.
The flying car—officially called a Land Aircraft Carrier—is already sold out for years ahead, with buyers coming heavily from the Middle East. That fact alone told me this was well past the concept stage.
Watching it fly in person
The demo took place outside the factory. A pilot took the controls of the ARIDGE, lifted off vertically, changed direction, flew a path, stopped, reversed course, and landed cleanly—the whole thing lasted around two minutes.
Watching an actual flying machine take off and land in front of you, built by a car company, does something to your sense of what’s possible.
How the ARIDGE system actually works
The flying unit folds its rotors and stows itself into the back of a dedicated carrier vehicle in under five minutes, via a one-button mechanism. The carrier recharges the flyer—you get around 20 to 25 minutes of flight time per charge, and the carrier can top it up approximately six times before needing a charge itself.
At around $300,000, the ARIDGE isn’t a mass-market product yet, but it’s a real one—and that distinction matters.
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Beijing: workshops, Auto China, and a night drive
A full day of workshops before the main event
After flying internally from Guangzhou to Beijing on the evening of the 22nd, day three was given over to workshops at the hotel covering design philosophy, intelligent driving strategy, and the IRON program in more detail. It was useful context—and in hindsight, it made the final day land considerably harder.
Auto China 2026 is almost incomprehensibly large
April 24th was Auto China 2026, the Beijing Motor Show. I knew it would be big, but I wasn’t prepared for quite how big. At one point, I checked my phone and found I’d walked five and a half miles—entirely indoors—and had seen perhaps a quarter of the floor.
The technology on display across the whole show was extraordinary: cars that could bounce like West Coast low-riders, rear cabins with fold-down cinema screens and foot massage functions, and luxury features at price points that bore little resemblance to what we’re used to in the West. XPENG’s press conference included a Q&A with the CEO and vice president covering global plans—particularly relevant given the brand has recently arrived in the UK market.
I left the show early—it was worth it
I cut my time at the show short because I had somewhere more important to be back at the hotel. It turned out to be the right call.
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Testing VLA 2.0 on Beijing’s streets at night
Six hundred horsepower, full self-driving, and a $41,000 price tag
Back at the hotel, I climbed into an XPENG P7 Ultra—a genuinely striking fastback saloon finished in lime green, with 600 horsepower, dual motors, and all-wheel drive. In China, it retails for the equivalent of around $41,000, which takes some getting used to when you consider what that buys you.
The car was equipped with XPENG’s VLA 2.0 intelligent driving system—the brand’s full self-driving technology, with global delivery planned for 2027 and Volkswagen already signed up as its first international customer.
I was bracing myself—and I was wrong
I’ll be honest: my expectations going in weren’t high. I’m a poor passenger at the best of times, and journalists on the trip who had experienced Tesla’s FSD described it as capable but aggressive at the throttle and under braking. I was quietly steeling myself for a tense 45 minutes. What I actually experienced was the opposite.
45 minutes through Beijing traffic, hands off the wheel
I pulled out of the hotel car park and, once on the road, engaged the system. For the next 40 to 45 minutes, the P7 Ultra drove itself through Beijing’s evening traffic—dense lanes, fast-moving cars, roadworks, cyclists, and scooter riders running entirely without lights in the pitch black at around seven in the evening.
The car handled all of it. What consistently surprised me was how smooth it felt—genuinely car-like in its acceleration and braking, not mechanical or lurching.
The one moment I nearly stepped in
At one point, I watched in my mirror as a car came up fast on my inside. The P7 Ultra indicated and began to pull across, and my instinct was to intervene. I held back.
The car had already calculated the gap, and the other driver—who could see the blue lights along the body that signal a full self-driving vehicle is active—adjusted accordingly. I never needed to take over. Not once in 45 minutes.
The journalist in the next car felt exactly the same
When I got out, I bumped into Larry Evans from CleanTechnica, who had just finished his own run. “I’m absolutely blown away,” he said, and I told him I felt the same. When I asked whether he’d felt more like a driver or a passenger, he didn’t hesitate—passenger, entirely.
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What four days with XPENG actually tells you
This is a tech company that happens to build vehicles
Spending four days inside XPENG’s operation—the showroom floor, the factories, the workshops, and Beijing’s streets at night—left me with one clear takeaway. This is not a Chinese car brand trying to add some tech gloss. It’s a technology company that builds vehicles, flying machines, and humanoid robots as the outputs of a single AI strategy.
The flying car isn’t a concept. VLA 2.0 isn’t vaporware. Volkswagen isn’t a naive customer. And IRON isn’t a trade show prop—it’ll be working in a dealership near you sooner than you might think.
The gap is smaller than most people in the West realize
Whether what’s coming out of China represents a genuine long-term threat to established Western automotive players is a question the industry is still working through. But from what I saw in Guangzhou and Beijing, the gap is smaller than most people seem to think—and it’s closing fast.
