Apparently this swoopy Chinese EV can do 438 miles on a charge
2 min readWelcome to an EV that can apparently travel a very, very long way between charges. Xpeng, a five-year old company headquartered in Guangzhou, China, claims the longest-range version of its new P7 can drive 438 miles on a single charge of its 80.9kWh battery. Yikes.
Admittedly that’s using the largely inaccurate NEDC test Europe ditched a while back – so there’s no way the P7 will actually do 438 miles between charges. But more is still better. The longest-range Tesla Model 3 is, by the looks of it, sold only in China – a rear-wheel drive version of the all-wheel drive ‘Long Range’ model we get over here, built at Tesla’s Shanghai factory. It claims around 415 miles of range on the NEDC test. Which, mathematicians of the Internet, is less than 438 miles. Musk tweet incoming in three…two…one…
It does look pretty smart, with full-width front and rear lights, flush-fitting door-handles and a minimalistic interior, and the specs read well. Xpeng says the P7 is available in “three versions and eight configurations”, the fastest of which is all-wheel drive and can do 0-62mph in about 4.3 seconds. The brakes are from Brembo and Bosch, while much of the computing power is handled by snappy processors from Qualcomm and Nvidia.
The P7 also has so many sensors and cameras, Xpeng insists it’s the “first L3 autonomy-ready production vehicle in the Chinese market”. In China prices start at the equivalent of around £27,000 after subsidies.
Will it ever make it to Europe or the US? The company has been granted a permit by the NHTSA to test cars on American soil, but it seems there are no immediate plans to sell this thing outside China. That good news, or bad?
