Xpeng secured municipal approval on Monday to launch Level 4 robotaxi trial operations across its home city of Guangzhou, marking a key step toward commercializing its autonomous transit services.

Announced by robotaxi unit head Candice Yuan, the qualification for intelligent connected vehicle demonstration operations allows Xpeng Yoyo to begin phased public trials across the metropolis using invitation codes.

The green light follows more than 2,000 internal test rides completed by August in Guangzhou, shifting the business from factory engineering toward live commercial validation.

Riders cannot book cars freely off the street yet. Candice Yuan, head of the robotaxi business, stated on Weibo that the unit will control early volume through invitation tokens while the operations team validates vehicle dispatch and road safety across urban districts.

Trial runs shift the project out of closed engineering evaluation into real passenger transit. Yuan noted the daily service routines will test operating economics and fleet software before the company offers standardized mobility packages to third-party fleet managers.

The robotaxi runs on Xpeng’s flagship GX sport utility vehicle platform, adapted directly on the factory assembly line rather than retrofitted by third-party shops. The vehicle dispenses with lidar sensors and pre-mapped high-definition survey data, relying entirely on optical cameras coupled with machine learning vision networks.

Compute hardware inside each vehicle runs on four proprietary Turing artificial intelligence processors delivering 3,000 TOPS of processing power. Path planning and dynamic driving actions operate through the company’s second-generation Vision-Language-Action artificial intelligence model, known as VLA 2.0.

Rather than building a proprietary retail ride-hailing network to take on incumbents directly, Xpeng intends to act as a hardware supplier and software partner.

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