The cost of Lidar is not as high as one might think and is within an acceptable range, according to Huang Xin, XPeng's director of automated driving products.
At the recent Guangzhou Auto Show, XPeng announced that the company's next-generation autopilot architecture will include Lidar technology.
XPeng said it will upgrade its autopilot software and hardware systems with Lidar technology to improve performance starting with production models in 2021, making the company the first automaker in the world to integrate Lidar technology into a production vehicle.
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Lidar will help XPeng break through some of the boundaries of existing autopilot, improve vehicle safety and better adapt to the complexity of domestic roads, Huang said in a recent interview with local media.
Huang mentioned that XPeng's autopilot architecture is future-proofed from the beginning, so it can be adapted even with the addition of Lidar sensors.
XPeng believes that full driverlessness will be further away than expected, but that better driving assistance will be easier.
XPeng will not define autopilot from an engineering perspective, but rather from a consumer perspective, he said.
