He Xiaopeng Predicts L4 Autonomy Likely by 2028, L5 Prototype Possible by 2030

At the Xuanyuan Automotive Blue Book Forum held on May 15, 2026, He Xiaopeng, Chairman and CEO of XPeng Motors, stated that the company’s renaming to “XPeng Group” reflects a reassessment of its business boundaries over the next decade. He explained that the deep integration of automotive and robotics capabilities makes a group-level brand name better aligned with the company’s diversified business portfolio. He noted that automobiles are evolving from traditional new-energy products in the physical world into dual-nature entities spanning both the “physical world and digital world,” a shift driving the company’s structural reorganization. He Xiaopeng added that it was only last year that he truly grasped the flywheel effect generated by “data as fuel.” Following a fundamental overhaul of its AI development paradigm, XPeng has accelerated the evolution of its autonomous driving technology by approximately sixfold. Based on this progress, he expressed a more optimistic outlook on the timeline for advanced autonomous driving: there is a very high likelihood of achieving L4-level software capability by 2028, and a prototype of L5-level autonomous driving could emerge around 2030. He further emphasized that the automotive industry is undergoing a profound transformation—from electrification toward intelligentization and robotics—and that the core competitive factors in the sector are undergoing fundamental changes.