Xpeng’s head of autonomous driving told Electrek that the company is spending roughly 300 million RMB (~$41 million) per month on AI training alone and believes it has already reached parity with Tesla’s FSD v13 — with v14 within reach before the end of summer.
I sat down with Dr. Xianming Liu, head of Xpeng’s General Intelligence Center, the day after he delivered a keynote at CVPR 2026 in Denver — sharing the stage with Tesla’s Ashok Elluswamy and leaders from Nvidia and Waymo at one of the world’s top computer vision conferences.
The conversation covered Xpeng’s VLA 2.0 architecture, the company’s sensor strategy, its Volkswagen licensing deal, and why Dr. Liu believes the entire autonomous driving industry needs to stop treating language models as the answer to self-driving.
Here’s the full interview:
‘Language is poison’
