Xpeng’s head of autonomous driving told Electrek that the company is spending roughly 300 million RMB (~$41 million) per month on AI training alone and believes it has already reached parity with Tesla’s FSD v13 — with v14 within reach before the end of summer.
Xpeng CEO He Xiaopeng made a public bet with Liu last year: if VLA 2.0 doesn’t match Tesla FSD performance by August 30, 2026, Liu has to streak naked across the Golden Gate Bridge.
He claims Xpeng went from FSD v12 parity to “almost v14 or even better than v13” in just a few months, crediting the team’s rapid iteration speed. The August deadline still stands, but Liu seems relaxed about it.
Perhaps the most revealing moment came when Liu described Xpeng’s identity. He compared the company to Google making Pixel phones — hardware exists primarily to demonstrate and collect data for the software.
“Producing cars or manufacturing cars definitely is one of the main reasons we are working now,” he said. “We need physical devices in the real world to make sure we get feedback, we get data. Just like Google is producing Pixel devices just trying to demonstrate, ‘OK, this is what Android can do.’ But on the other hand, we want to make sure we are an AI company.”
This framing puts the Volkswagen VLA 2.0 licensing deal in context. Volkswagen became the first external customer for VLA 2.0 earlier this year, with deployment planned for 2027.
At the link there is a 30 minute interview with Dr. Xianming Liu, head of Xpeng’s General Intelligence Center.