XPeng’s new ‘budget’ electric vehicle looks like the Ferrari Luce

While you walk At the XPeng showcase event in Munich you are greeted by, I kid you not, a giant wooden Trojan horse. It’s not exactly a subtle message from a Chinese brand announcing the world’s first ever release of an electric vehicle, right in the backyard of the German auto industry.

It’s hard to believe that XPeng was founded just 12 years ago. However, in 2020 it was already shipped EV in Norway, marking the start of the Chinese company’s European journey. Today, alongside cars, it has robots And flying cars in its commercial product portfolio.

Look the top 10 Electric vehicle manufacturers in China by volume, and you won’t find XPeng, but it’s growing and has built a bigger reputation outside its home country. It now wants to go global with its latest model, the L03the brand’s first new car which will be launched in 60 countries in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.

The L03 is a major plus for XPeng as it is its “budget” model, starting at €35,600 (around $40,000), at a lower price than its price tag. G6 Competitor to the Tesla Model Y, and sell in volume.

Yes, the L03 is the company’s mass-market game. Despite the attractive prices, XPeng sought to make the specifications attractive: a claimed WLTP range of 320 miles; fast charge from 10 to 80 percent in 20 minutes; panoramic glass roof; heated and cooled massage seats; 256-color ambient lighting; brushed metal speaker covers; an impressive drag coefficient of 0.228 to maximize range; smart parking; a 15.6-inch 2.5K central screen; 27-inch HUD; AI-based voice control; and even integrated Google Maps.

All this and more comes standard, whether you opt for the vanilla model, Long Range, AWD, or Ultra. The phrase XPeng continues to use for this embarrassment of riches is “beyond class.” He wants the L03 to go hand in hand with higher-segment electric vehicles, cars like the Volkswagen ID.4.

Performance? Well, the 4,650mm five-seat L03 can hit 0-60 mph in just 4.5 seconds on top-of-the-line models, but that drops to 7.5 seconds on the base Standard Range version.

While other L03 models are level 2 for autonomous drivingthe Ultra upgrades to L2++ for next-generation, hands-off point-to-point navigation expected to arrive in Europe in 2027 (thanks to a trio of 7-nanometer Turing AI chips from XPeng). An over-the-air update will be all that is needed to activate this eyes/hands-free system.

All of this represents, on paper, excellent value for money. L03 owners will get what they pay for. But not everything is positive. In China, the L03 is called Mona L03 because it is part of XPeng’s budget-friendly Mona sub-brand. XPeng doesn’t want to emphasize this fact, and I’m told the specs have been changed for this “non-Mona” global L03, which I assume is intended to justify the name change.

For L4 autonomy in the future, even if the Ultra L03 has the brains to perform at that level, Xianming Liu, XPeng’s senior director of engineering, tells me the car doesn’t have the hardware to meet the required six levels of redundancy. This “budget” EV will never be authorized beyond L2++ skills.

The other potential problem when it comes to autonomy – depending on your point of view – is that XPeng is in the “no lidar” camp (as is Tesla with Full Self-Driving, or FSD) for autonomous vehicle technology. Liu insists that the increased computing power and increasingly refined models, combined with the L03’s integrated camera system, are more than comparable to any competitor offering a lidar-powered alternative. Looking videos like this will, however, provide food for thought.

Right now, when I ask automakers which system is better, lidar or cameras, it seems to depend entirely on which system the automaker supports. Most of XPeng’s Chinese competitors (BYD, Zeekr, Nio) have opted for lidar.

In person, what’s striking about the L03 to the casual eye – aside from the surprisingly nice interior that does indeed seem “beyond classy”, with docking points for action cameras and magnetic clips for accessories such as camping lights – is how much it resembles the L03. Ferrari Luce. It’s not miles from Denza’s Z9 GTeither.

The three electric vehicles have radically different prices: budget, premium and luxury. So it’s interesting that there seems to be some convergence in style here, one that helps XPeng appear more premium than it could be, and that arguably impacts premium brands as they struggle to truly differentiate their offerings when luxury electric vehicles don’t sell.

Perhaps not surprisingly, some see a similarity between the Luce and the L03. XPeng’s head of design is none other than JuanMa López, Ferrari’s former head of exterior design from 2010 to 2018, during which he helped determine the contours of some 25 models, including the LaFerrari, SF90 Stradale and Monza SP. López was not involved in the Luce itself; this design task was unusually assigned to LoveOfthe agency founded by Jony Ive in 2019 when it was released from Apple.

I brought this convergence of design styles to Rafik Ferrag, head of creative design at XPeng, and asked him why exterior aesthetics no longer seem to denote a car’s segment. Twenty years ago, you could look at a car and know what price range it fell into. This is no longer the case today.

“Yes, that’s true. In the past, it was impossible for an entry-level car to afford the technology or even the decorative elements that a luxury car has. Today, that is no longer true,” says Ferrag. “Our goal as designers is to reach the highest level. If we can look as good as a Ferrari or a Bentley in an entry-level car, we will. And that’s what we’re trying to do here, to achieve that precision, that fit and finish of materials, color accuracy and technology.”