XPeng opened a silver paint finish reserved until now for its L4 autonomous driving validation cars to buyers of the GX flagship SUV, the company said Friday, as monthly registrations of the model in China settle around 7,000 units.
The colour, 新月银, renders as Crescent Silver, though XPeng has published no English name and the Chinese also reads as New Moon Silver. The company called it “the signature colour of XPeng’s exploration of the future” in a post on its official Weibo account, and one of its most popular finishes.
“As the exclusive body colour of the XPeng GX L4 autonomous driving validation vehicles, Crescent Silver has witnessed every step XPeng has taken towards the mobility of the future,” the company wrote. It has not said how many validation cars exist, where they operate, or what validation covers. Neither China nor any other market allows a private owner to operate a vehicle at that level, and the GX ships with a driver-assistance system.
The addition takes the GX to seven exterior colours, alongside the two-tone silver-grey Kunlun Cloud Realm, which should not be confused with the new finish, plus Fjord Grey, matte Cloud Desert Gold, Danxia Red, Polar Black and Everest White. XPeng did not say whether the colour carries a surcharge.
The Model
The GX is XPeng’s first full-size SUV and the vehicle around which it has built its autonomy marketing.
Presales opened in Shenzhen on April 15 at a single price of 399,800 yuan ($59,600), and the car launched on May 20 with limited-time pricing from 269,800 yuan ($40,200).
It is sold in fully electric and extended-range form across four trims, Max, Ultra SE, Ultra and Ultra Flagship.
The electric version uses a 91.9 kWh lithium iron phosphate pack on the three lower trims, rated at 665 km on the CLTC cycle, and a 110 kWh nickel-manganese-cobalt pack on the Ultra Flagship at 750 km. T
he range-extender pairs a 1.5-litre engine with a 63.3 kWh LFP battery on every trim, giving 430 km of electric range and 1,585 km combined.
The hardware underneath is the reason for the L4 framing. XPeng fits four of its own Turing chips, three main and one redundant, for a claimed 3,000 TOPS, on a native by-wire chassis running the second-generation VLA stack, and describes the car as the first model in China developed to L4 standards and put into series production.
Founder and CEO He Xiaopeng said at presale that the company was skipping L3 entirely.
Registrations in China
China Passenger Car Association data show the GX at 270 registrations in May, the month deliveries began, then 6,737 in June as the ramp took hold. July came in at 7,016 and August at 7,002, a fall of 0.2%.
Two flat months make a plateau rather than a curve.
At about 7,000 a month the GX accounts for about 18% of group volume, measured against the 39,107 vehicles XPeng delivered in August, and annualises near 84,000 units.
Registration data and delivery data are different series and should not be read together. The CPCA figures count insurance registrations in China, while XPeng’s own totals include exports and recognise timing differently.
XPeng said it took 24,863 firm orders within 12 hours of launch, a number it has not updated since. He said at the G9L launch in Beijing on September 17 that cumulative GX deliveries had passed 25,000.
