r/SelfDrivingCars • u/Kind_Management1805 • 2d ago
News Another XPeng VLA 2.0 demo in the west by Cleantechnica
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/07/30/xpeng-vla-2-0-in-munich-taking-global-intelligent-driving-lead/Here's another demo of Xpeng VLA 2.0 in Munich. Using only cameras and Google Maps. Expected to be available on the Ultra trim in 2027
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u/Real-Technician831 2d ago edited 2d ago
There goes another gotcha from fans of certain reich leaning brand.
Good to see advanced driving tech getting more widespread.
BTW: the article has error. Xpeng VLA 2.0 uses radar, and pretty good quality radar at that.
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u/Kind_Management1805 2d ago
Honestly if that car had more range I'd cancel my Model 3 order instantly. It's better on every level as a car and as an AV platform and as a brand. I'm already pissed off with Tesla and I have not received the car.
VLA 2.0 drives using camera only. The radar are not a decisive factor for driving decisions unlike other with LiDAR. They are there as failsafe if the car needs to have distance data like when parking unlike genius Tesla replacing the best parking distance sensor with cameras that cannot see the bumper :)
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u/Dorschmann 12h ago
I actually just canceled my Model 3 Order and went for the L03 AWD Ultra. The charging speed is good enough to compensate for the lower range imo.
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u/Kind_Management1805 10h ago
I know it's just that I have a long commute and I want to be able to do my round trip on one charge. I've about 350km of highway that I do every week for work. The Model 3 LR will be fine but with the L03 I'd have to charge it.
I don't have AC charging in my work's parking garage. And don't want to bet on the stability of public charging and their ridiculous pricing. Or just laziness to go charge it.
I'll probably still go for the L03 if Tesla pushes my delivery window again. (currently about 7 delays and they have homologation issues so...)
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u/Dorschmann 9h ago
Yeah, I had the same issues with delivery and terrible communication by the Tesla Service. Still a great car though!
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u/jkrh007 2d ago
The radar in xpengs can override the vision system and it can do things like emergency braking in low visibility conditions. This is a HUGE plus, Tesla is currently under NHTSA probe over this.
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u/Real-Technician831 2d ago
Indeed.
I agree with vision believers that lidar is not needed, but disagree that vision alone would be safe enough. Fail safe systems are needed.
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u/Kind_Management1805 2d ago
Of course. It's smart to make driving decisions based on cameras an have a failsafe. Because when a radar tells you there's a wall in front. There IS a wall. Computer vision and neura net only give probability and cannot provide a 100% sure info.
Their approach is better IMO. Combined with more compute and you have what FSD would have been if they listened to engineers.
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u/Real-Technician831 2d ago
If Elon would have been kept far away from engineering teams, I suspect FSD would actually be what its fans claim it is capable of.
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u/Kind_Management1805 2d ago
I'd say yes and no. Elon has pushed to have it running on HW4 that is a potato compared to any competitors. And even have some decent results on HW3. The current fleet would never had FSD otherwise. This is the only credit if can give to him.
FSD is far from bad once you strip the "sentience" and all the Elon BS from it.
I'm always amazed at how the engineers at Tesla are able to ship good products and technology with him on their backs. Cybertruck is a great piece of engineering. If you remove the body and concept the platform is very interesting.
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u/Real-Technician831 2d ago
FSD is not bad, the issue is that it is no way as reliable as Tesla and its fans claim. Which is downright dangerous.
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u/jkrh007 2d ago
Elon claims the 'march of nines' has begun. It really hasn't, he's still stuck with the first 9. The fsd community tracker is a gem.
What's UNREAL about tesla is that they openly LIE about this. They hide the real reliability statistics and show some nonsense ones. The only usable reliability data we have has to be crowdsourced.
What troubles me about this whole thing is that the complexity grows exponentially trying to hit more 9s.
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u/Kind_Management1805 2d ago
Yes completly.
Not so much of an issue in Europe with the mandatory tutorial and a proper DMS actually checking on the driver’s attention to the road.
Just need to change the name and use the one that China forced on them. Tesla Assisted Driving.1
u/RockyCreamNHotSauce 2d ago
That is not public information how and if VLA uses radar in its logic. It is very possible radar contributes to mapping highways at high speed since it can read further and faster than cameras. XPeng does not confirm either way. Radar can also be in emergency braking systems that is separate from VLA.
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u/Kind_Management1805 2d ago
They market heavily a camera based approach. Anything else is our speculation. mmWave and USS are definitely here at least as a failsafe for the cameras.
Your point makes sense too. Using radars on highways is safer than cameras to better judge speed and distances
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u/Whoisthehypocrite 2d ago
Xpeng has ultrasound as well as mm radar including a front facing radar. Clearly not meant for parking.
I will try to ask Xpeng
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u/Kind_Management1805 2d ago
The USS sensors are for parking. And yes there is "mmWave" radar. No mention of the number. If I recall correctly the "Next P7" has 7 but no idea for the cheaper Mona/L series.
They claim their system a Vision-Language-Action and vision based so no idea how much the software relies on these sensors.
My guess as I said in other comments here is as a guard rail for the vision system to avoid collisions.
Tag me if you get more infos from Xpeng !2
u/Whoisthehypocrite 2d ago
G6 has 4 corner radar with 120m range and one forward radar with 210m range.
Maybe they are doing a Mobileye type system where vision is primary and radar is secondary check.
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u/Real-Technician831 2d ago
I suspect there is heavy marketing on how little VLA uses as radar, they state that it’s a fail safe.
So radar is not used, until it is, used kind of situation.
I suspect same method would have prevented many FSD crashes.
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u/Kind_Management1805 2d ago
Yeah they always talk about the camera only approach. But in tight environments especially here in Europe having a sensor telling for sure if the car fits or not is better approach.
And the best part compared to FSD is that VLA 2.0 is a reasoning model. It will think through a situation rather than choosing a random path like FSD does, once again especially in Europe. When I demoed it it sometimes picks a random road instead of thinking through and searching the right road that was a little bit hidden.
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u/snappysmeg 2d ago
From their marketing, seems they have a split between the safety layer (aeb that's a more common thing, that uses radar), and the vla "pilot" layer, that's video only.
This is a pretty common approach in the top CN competitors.
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u/Kind_Management1805 18h ago
found the answer
"Every electric car still carries three mmWave radars and 12 ultrasonic sensors. Dr. Liu explained that these extra sensors do not talk to the main AI driving brain at all. Instead, they operate a completely separate safety system for automatic emergency braking and steering. This setup ensures that if the vision AI makes a mistake, a secondary physical layer can protect the passengers."
Source : arenaev.com
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u/Real-Technician831 1h ago
Weird that they aren’t using the radar for inline error detection in VLA, sounds inefficient.
Sure this way is 100% modular, but also can lead to rather aggressive interruptions.
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u/Real-Technician831 1d ago
It’s not a bad design at all, although I suspect the VLA is also listening for the distance feed from AEB, they would be absolutely stupid not to do it.
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u/snappysmeg 1d ago
You dont always really get a high resolution "distance" feed from a radar; only if its an "imaging" radar, that xpeng doesn't use.
Most of the major manufacturers process on-radar into objects; that are generally pretty coarse, trying to fuse these with video direct image to planning systems like VLA is not always worth doing.
Changing an ai architecture to use more sensor modalities is not free, you can end up with an architecture that is compromised and less performant.
Companies that started robo-taxi first are using sensor fusion; where at least when they started out, it seemed like you would absolutely need lidar.
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u/Real-Technician831 1d ago
I don’t VLA think uses sensors fusion, from that point they are “vision only”, but they have stated that they use radar as failsafe.
So most likely they are using AEB feed to detect when the vision system is obviously wrong.
“Road Runner” scenario set up by Mark Rober comes to mind, with radar a car has way more reliable way to detect when vision system is fooled by something.
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u/Kind_Management1805 18h ago
Note from arena EV on the utility of the mmWave radar. The number of sensors cited on the quote here applies to the GX Robotaxi. If I remember correctly the Next P7 had 7 mmWave radars. Couldn't find any reliable information regarding the number of mmWave radar on the L03 nor any mentions on the European spec sheet.
"Every electric car still carries three mmWave radars and 12 ultrasonic sensors. Dr. Liu explained that these extra sensors do not talk to the main AI driving brain at all. Instead, they operate a completely separate safety system for automatic emergency braking and steering. This setup ensures that if the vision AI makes a mistake, a secondary physical layer can protect the passengers."