He Xiaopeng Pledges: Achieve L4 Autonomous Driving Within a Year as VLA Tech Accelerates

Xpeng Motors CEO He Xiaopeng recently announced that the company aims to achieve Level 4 fully autonomous driving within as little as one year. He stated that Xpeng’s second-generation Vehicle Language Assistant (VLA) system significantly outperforms the industry’s mainstream end-to-end solutions in user experience. According to disclosures, the VLA system has already reduced hard braking incidents by 99% and abrupt accelerations by 98%, while also markedly improving nighttime decision-making and comfort during evasive maneuvers. The system has undergone 468 iterations in just three months—averaging nearly four updates per day. Powered by a physics-based AI foundation model, the VLA integrates Xpeng’s self-developed Turing chip, multimodal perception, and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) visual reasoning technologies, continuously refined through simulation and reinforcement learning. Demonstrating unwavering confidence in the technology’s real-world deployment, He Xiaopeng issued a bold personal pledge: if the VLA’s capabilities do not match those of Tesla’s Silicon Valley team by August this year, he will run naked across the Golden Gate Bridge.