The third model of Xiaopeng car equipped with lidar will be produced in Zhaoqing factory.

The third model of Xiaopeng, which has been rumored for a long time, finally has more definite news.

On January 26, Xiaopeng President Gu Hongdi said that Xiaopeng will release its third model this year and will launch the new car to the mass market in the fourth quarter.

"the third model and Xiaopeng P7 are produced in Zhaoqing factory, which is a flexible production line, while Xiaopeng G3 continues to be manufactured by seahorse." Xiaopeng car insiders told the Financial Associated Press.

At present, Xiaopeng's models for sale include Xiaopeng G3 and Xiaopeng P7. A document entitled "examination and approval opinions of Zhaoqing Ecological Environment Bureau on the Environmental impact report form of the Annual production Line expansion Project of 100000 New Energy passenger vehicles in Zhaoqing Xiaopeng Automobile Intelligent Network Union Science and Technology Industrial Park" confirms the views of the above-mentioned people.

The document shows that after Xiaopeng Motor has obtained the qualification for the production of new energy vehicles, it has put forward a plan for the transformation of the existing production line to the local competent authorities, that is, it is proposed to add the final assembly process to the original assembly workshop, and the original declared assembly workshop will be changed into the final assembly workshop. After the completion of the expansion, the production scale will be 100000 sets of new energy passenger vehicles per year.

On May 18, 2020, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued road motor vehicle production enterprises and products (332nd batch). Zhaoqing Xiaopeng New Energy Investment Company (formerly Guangdong Fudi Automobile) was included in the list. This means that the production qualification of Xiaopeng auto self-built factory has been approved and can be used for final assembly production.

Although the cumulative delivery of the Xiaopeng P7 produced in the Zhaoqing factory in 2020 is more than 15000, there is still a lot of surplus compared with the annual production capacity of 100000 vehicles in the Zhaoqing factory. After the flexible transformation of the factory, it is possible to continue to produce new products.

Another document obtained by a reporter from the Financial Associated Press shows that the relevant regulatory authorities monitored Xiaopeng's Zhaoqing plant for two consecutive days on October 29 and October 30, 2020. Xiaopeng's pure electric model based on platform A has an annual production capacity of 40,000 vehicles or 160 vehicles per day, with an actual average daily production capacity of 136 vehicles in two days, while the corresponding data for pure electric models based on platform B are 60,000, 240 and 204.

If calculated on the basis of 250 days of production in a year, the annual production of the two models would be 85000 vehicles. Among them, the annual output of platform An is about 34000 and that of platform B is about 51000.

Prior to this, Xiaopeng has revealed that its third model will be an A-class pure electric car. Compared with the current official subsidized Xiaopeng P7 with a price range of 229900 to 349900 yuan, the relatively lower-level third model is obviously more competitive in terms of price and will also become a volume model.

In addition to the price, another core competitiveness of Xiaopeng's third model may be that it will be equipped with Xiaopeng's official lidar.

On January 1 this year, Xiaopeng announced that it had reached a cooperation with DJI incubated Livox Xevo Technology to use its Xiaopengding plate-making lidar on the new mass production model to be launched in 2021, and Livox has officially become Xiaopeng's first partner in the lidar field.

Coincidentally, just eight days after Xiaopeng announced that the lidar would get on board this year, Weilai also unveiled the first new car equipped with lidar on its 2021 NIO DAY on January 9. The supplier of ET7, is Innovusion, which is invested by Lilai and Ludai Capital. From the time of delivery, the ET7 will be later than Xiaopeng's third new car.

Different from Tesla's insistence on the path of visual algorithm, both Xiaopeng and Weilai, two new Chinese car-making forces, have adopted the technical path of lidar in the field of self-driving, which has also triggered the gap between Musk and he Xiaopeng, founder of Xiaopeng Automobile. Analysts said, "Tesla gave up lidar for two reasons: first, the lidar is too expensive; second, Musk firmly believes that the Tesla algorithm will be upgraded faster than the lidar price reduction."

"for the domestic market, the path of lidar is more reasonable. Because the domestic policy requirements are higher, the domestic car companies are not as good as Tesla in the visual algorithm. In addition, the cost of lidar begins to decline under the scale effect. " Ma Liangxu, a senior automotive analyst at China Merchants Securities, said, "in fact, Tesla is also studying two paths, rather than giving up lidar completely."