XPENG says VLA 2.0 outpaces Tesla

XPENG used Auto China 2026 in Beijing this week to argue its VLA 2.0 driving system is already ahead of Tesla in parts of China’s road environment. (prnewswire.com) (scmp.com) The company’s own timeline is more concrete than the show-floor rhetoric: XPENG said on March 2 that VLA 2.0’s global delivery is planned for 2027, that robotaxi public-road testing has started, and that trial operations in China are due later this year. (xpeng.com) XPENG describes VLA 2.0 as a single foundation model that combines seeing the road, reasoning about it, and acting on it, instead of stitching together separate software modules. The company said the system is built to rely less on high-definition maps and fixed rules in dense urban traffic. (xpeng.com) At Auto China, XPENG released its first VLA 2.0 usage report and tied the software to sales. It said Ultra-series orders rose 118% month over month, nearly 100,000 consumers tried in-store demos, satisfaction reached 98%, and the time from test drive to order fell 44.7%. (prnewswire.com) XPENG also said 98.52% of owners activated intelligent-driving functions every day in their first week, and it plans to add campus and underground-parking features next. Those are the kinds of low-speed, messy environments Chinese automakers increasingly use to show software maturity. (prnewswire.com) Tesla, meanwhile, has not given a firm launch date for a broader China rollout of Full Self-Driving. In its April 22 first-quarter materials, Tesla said it is working to launch FSD in China “as soon as possible,” but provided no specific timetable. (cnevpost.com) (ir.tesla.com) Tesla’s official first-quarter update did say FSD Supervised was approved in the Netherlands in April and that version 14.3 launched the same month. The filing also repeated Tesla’s standard warning that FSD Supervised requires active driver supervision and does not make the vehicle autonomous. (assets-ir.tesla.com) The comparison is also uneven because Tesla’s full China approval is still pending, while XPENG is judging itself on home roads it already serves. South China Morning Post reported that He Xiaopeng said VLA already outperformed Tesla in certain complex scenarios, even though Tesla’s full version is not yet approved in China. (scmp.com) Tesla added a separate constraint on April 22 when Elon Musk said Hardware 3 cannot achieve unsupervised Full Self-Driving because memory bandwidth is the bottleneck. That leaves Tesla balancing a larger global software business with hardware limits on part of its installed base. (assets-ir.tesla.com) (teslanorth.com) For now, XPENG has a live product in China, a 2027 global-delivery plan, and a public challenge aimed at Tesla. Tesla has the bigger paid base and wider international footprint, but in China the race is still being set by approvals, local roads, and what each company can actually ship. (xpeng.com) (assets-ir.tesla.com)