XPeng’s New ‘Budget’ EV Looks Like the Ferrari Luce

As you walk into XPeng’s Munich showcase event, you’re greeted by, I kid you not, a giant wooden Trojan horse. Not exactly a subtle message from a Chinese brand announcing its first-ever global release of an electric vehicle, right in the backyard of the German auto industry.

It’s hard to believe that XPeng was founded just shy of 12 years ago. Yet by 2020 it was already shipping EVs to Norway, marking the start of the Chinese company’s European journey.

Look at the top 10 EV manufacturers in China by volume, and you won’t find XPeng, but it’s growing and has forged a bigger reputation outside of its home country. Now it wants to go global with its latest model, the L03, the brand’s first new car that will launch in 60 countries across Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific.

The L03 is a big play for XPeng because this is its “budget” model, starting at €35,600 (about $40,000), priced to sit below its G6 Tesla Model Y competitor, and to sell in volume.

Yes, the L03 is the company’s mass-market play. Despite the keen pricing, XPeng has sought to make the specs attractive: a claimed WLTP 320-mile range; fast charging from 10 to 80 percent in 20 minutes; panoramic glass roof; heated and cooled massage seats; 256-color ambient lighting; an impressive 0.228 drag coefficient to squeeze out more range; smart parking; a 15.6-inch 2.5K central screen; 27-inch HUD; AI-powered voice control; and even Google Maps built in.

All this and more come as standard, whether you go for the vanilla model, the Long Range, AWD, or Ultra. The phrase XPeng keeps using for this embarrassment of riches is “beyond class.” It wants the L03 to go toe-to-toe with EVs in the segment above it—cars like the Volkswagen ID.4.

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

While the other L03 models are Level 2 for autonomous driving, the Ultra bumps to L2++ for next-gen point-to-point, hands-off navigation that is supposedly coming to Europe in 2027 (thanks to a trio of XPeng’s Turing 7-nanometer AI chips). An over-the-air update will be all that’s required to activate this eyes on/hands off system.

This is all, on paper, great value for money. L03 owners will be getting a lot of EV for their buck. But it’s not all upside. In China, the L03 is called the Mona L03 as it’s part of XPeng’s budget Mona sub-brand. XPeng doesn’t want to highlight this fact, and I’m told the specs have been tweaked for this global “non-Mona” L03, which I suppose is intended to justify the name change.

For L4 autonomy in the future, even though the Ultra L03 has the brains to operate at that level, Xianming Liu, XPeng’s senior director of engineering, tells me the car lacks the hardware that meets the required six levels of redundancy. This “budget” EV will never be allowed beyond L2++ skills.