Xpeng Motors' new progress in autonomous driving, obtains California autonomous driving license

Recently, documents from the California Department of Transportation (DMV) showed that Xpeng Motors' North American subsidiary XMotors.ai announced that it had obtained a local autonomous driving road test license.

XMotors.ai, based in Palo Alto, will work with Xpeng Motors’ R&D teams in Guangzhou and Beijing to tailor production-ready autonomous driving solutions for Xpeng’s first two models to be launched in 2018 and 2019.

Gu Junli, a former Tesla technical expert, serves as the vice president of autonomous driving R&D at Xpeng Motors. Sinan Karahan, the former chief research scientist of sensor algorithms at SF Motors and senior motion signal processing software engineer at Apple, serves as the chief scientist of XMotors.ai.

Among the China-related companies that have obtained California road test licenses, there are wealthy traditional automobile manufacturers, currently booming technology giants, and start-ups that are confident in financing.

Google was one of the earliest companies to research autonomous driving technology, followed by Tesla, Uber, Audi and other companies that announced plans to develop autonomous driving.

As technology giants have developed software and hardware technologies to a certain extent, road testing has become an important means to test the performance of autonomous vehicles. However, there was no law to allow or prohibit road testing of autonomous vehicles at that time. So they conducted autonomous driving tests in the gray area of ​​the law.

In September 2012, California signed the SB1298 bill that allowed self-driving cars to be legally on the road. In December 2015, California's automotive industry policymakers formulated legal regulations for fully automatic driverless cars for the first time, accelerating the progress of self-driving vehicles on the road.

In addition to relevant regulatory support, California's Silicon Valley is also home to technology giants such as Apple, Google, and Facebook, as well as industry players such as Uber and Tesla.

Autonomous driving road tests are also being deployed in China.

On December 18, 2017, the Beijing Municipal Transportation Commission issued the "Beijing Autonomous Driving Vehicle Road Test Management Implementation Rules (Trial)", and Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Changsha, Guangzhou and Hangzhou successively issued autonomous driving vehicle road test management measures. It is expected that more and more cities will open autonomous driving road tests in the future.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.