XPeng is continue to targeted in boosting the sales of its electric vehicles. But it has been focusing on constructing out long run businesses in flying cars and robotics.
Qilai Shen | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and electric powered vehicle startup Xpeng are opening a computing centre to teach computer software for driverless cars, the two corporations mentioned Tuesday.
Autonomous driving techniques have to have large amounts of facts to be processed in purchase to prepare algorithms.
Xpeng statements that the new computing center will reduce the instruction time for its core autonomous driving model from seven days to within just an hour.
The Guangzhou-headquartered organization will use technological innovation from Alibaba’s cloud division for its computing requires. The computing heart termed Fuyao will be found in the region of Inner Mongolia in northern China.
Alibaba, an investor in Xpeng, has been striving to bolster its cloud computing division amid a slowdown in its core commerce small business. The move also highlights how China’s technologies giants are striving to jump into the quickly-expanding electrical car space.
Tencent, for instance, is trying to situation by itself as the go-to technological know-how corporation for international automakers to use for a variety of automotive technology-connected products and services when they enter the Chinese industry.
For Xpeng, the go marks its ambitions to pull ahead in the fiercely competitive electrical car market in China and endeavor to problem giants Tesla and Warren Buffett-backed BYD. China’s electrical auto startups from Nio to Xpeng see autonomous driving characteristics as a way to do that.
Xpeng has an state-of-the-art driver-support method, or ADAS, called XPILOT mounted in some of its vehicles. Consumers who choose for this aspect can get some autonomous features this kind of as computerized lane switching.
Past calendar year, Xpeng introduced the City NGP, which stands for navigation guided pilot. The system allows Xpeng’s cars to transform lanes, pace up or sluggish down, or overtake autos and enter and exit highways. Earlier the procedure was developed just for highways, but it has now been created for towns as well.
Xpeng has tried using to placement itself much more like a technology company rather than an automaker and has been investing in places this sort of as robotics and flying passenger drones.
Chinese regulators have, for the most portion, been pretty encouraging of autonomous driving technological know-how. Several cities across the country have allowed domestic driverless car or truck corporations to exam and even start robotaxi providers much too.