XPeng Robotaxi Secures Driverless Testing Permit in Guangzhou; Gen 2 VLA Bridges L2 to L4 Capabilities

On August 27, XPeng Motors announced that its Robotaxi equipped with the second-generation VLA (Vision-Language-Action) system has recently obtained remote testing authorization for intelligent connected vehicles in Guangzhou, allowing driverless road tests—without a safety operator in the driver’s seat—on designated Level 1, 2, and 3 testing roads in the city. The company stated that the second-generation VLA, built on a unified technical foundation, now seamlessly supports autonomous driving capabilities ranging from Level 2 to Level 4. Through learning-based token compression and distillation training, it can deploy the base model’s capabilities onto lower-compute platforms without compromising input information or model capacity. The distilled Turing VLA 2.0 Lite also improves as the underlying base model advances.