According to Brian Gu, the company’s president and honorary vice chairman, the newest model of the Chinese electric car start-up Xpeng Inc (NYSE: XPEV) will likely sell better than the company’s most popular car to date.
On Wednesday, the business made the official debut of its new G9 SUV. It was initially planned for the car to start being delivered in October.
“We think the volume of G9 next year will exceed what we have accomplished for P7, which would make it one of our top-selling vehicles,” Gu said in an interview this week with Eunice Yoon of CNBC. “We think the volume of G9 next year will exceed what we have achieved for P7.”
Xpeng Inc Next SUV is the Next Big Thing
The P7 was Xpeng’s first sedan, which was introduced in May 2020. It soon outsold the company’s previous SUV, the G3, which was introduced in December last year. According to the China Passenger Car Association, the P7 came in at number 10 among all new energy passenger cars — excluding SUVs — sold in China during the first eight months of this year. SUVs were not included in this ranking.
According to CNBC’s calculations based on Xpeng Inc’s statistics (NYSE: XPEV), as of the end of August, more than 123,000 P7 automobiles had been delivered. It is twice as high as the cumulative delivery of over 67,000 G3s.
According to the data analysis findings, Xpeng Inc (NYSE: XPEV) started making deliveries of another sedan, the P5, in 2018. As of August, the company had already made cumulative deliveries of more than 37,000 automobiles.
The newest version of Xpeng’s assisted driving system is included in the G9. According to Gu, its performance will be much more impressive than a previous model’s because the new SUV features high-power Nvidia Orin chips.
According to him, the new vehicle’s range may be increased by 200 kilometers with just five minutes of charging at an Xpeng station.
However, Nio and Li Auto, two competing Chinese electric vehicle start-ups, have new SUVs that will be available to customers this fall.
According to Gu, the market is currently “extremely competitive.” To get that growth going again, we need to develop new items that are superior and more interesting.
He expressed his desire that the debut of the G9 would “kickstart our mega product cycle.”
The following year, Xpeng intends to release two new models, one of which will be a smaller automobile, while the other will be a larger vehicle.
This year saw a significant increase in people purchasing new energy vehicles, such as electric cars. According to the China Passenger Car Association, from January to August, 3.26 million new energy passenger cars were sold, which is more than double the number of vehicles sold during the same period last year and accounts for around 25% of all passenger cars sold in the nation.
However, according to Gu, total sales of electric cars have been far less robust since June than at the beginning of the year. He alluded to several causes, including consumers’ hesitation to purchase products, the anticipation of new product releases, and store closures caused by Covid.
He stated that the foot traffic has decreased to less than half of what it was before the summer.
Gu stated that Xpeng was not impacted by the most recent limitations imposed by the United States on Nvidia sales to Chinese enterprises, echoing the sentiments of others at his company and in the industry.
Gu reiterated his previous statement, “It does not apply to us because we do not use that kind of chips.”
“I believe, the cloud or data center partners that we deal with, they need to look about how to continue to secure such capabilities,” he added.
Image: I Stock © CHUNYIP WONG
Author Valerie Remorosa 
