Autonomous Vehicles

XPeng renamed its Tech Day event “AI Day” this year for a reason. Artificial intelligence was at the forefront of most of He Xiaopeng’s conversations on stage, and the debut of the mobility company’s new Turing chip was also a part of the event.

The company showcased a new Turing AI Intelligent Driving System, powered by XPeng’s proprietary Turing AI chip, described as “a world-first chip designed for AI vehicles, robots, and flying cars.” The new chip features a 40-core processor and supports models with up to 30 billion parameters, delivering the power of three high-performance chips in one.

Xiaopeng explained that the Turin chip has already completed over 2,700 functional verifications in a mere 40 days and has achieved three times the industry standard for development efficiency during that time.

In addition to powering XPeng’s flying cars and humanoid robots (more on that below), Xiaopeng used the 2024 Tech Day event to unveil a new Canghai Platform that will enable full Level 4 autonomous driving. XPeng has already been promising fully autonomous robotaxis by 2025, and we now have a better idea of the technology that will support that, again, centered around its new Turing AI chip.

The company explained that the new platform would act as the previously teased neural network for XPeng’s new line of AI-centric vehicles, supporting driving (with or without a human in the driver’s seat) with enhanced safety features, 33x bandwidth, and 12x faster camera image processing, thus creating “a foundation for full-scenario AI-enabled driving experiences.”

Today, Waymo announced its Series C funding round closed at an oversubscribed amount of $5.6 billion, led, of course, by Alphabet, Inc.

Following its latest investment, the company said it would continue to expand its Waymo-One rideshare services around current cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix. In 2025, the company also plans to expand robotaxi rides to Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia. The expansion of cities has resulted from an ongoing partnership between Waymo and Uber.

Now, with that context in mind, CEO Elon Musk has made new comments during the conference call following Tesla’s release of its Q3 2024 financial results:

We expect to see roughly a five- or six-fold improvement in miles between interventions [with v13] compared to 12.5. And actually, looking at the year as whole, the improvement in miles interventions, we think will be at least three orders of magnitude. So, that’s a very dramatic improvement in the course of the year, and we expect that trend to continue next year.

The second part of the comment will be more challenging to verify, but for the first time, Musk is clearly comparing two versions for the first time.

He says that Tesla’s upcoming FSD v13, which is supposed to come within the next week, will achieve a 5 to 6x increase in miles between disengagement compared to v12.5.

Ashok Elluswamy, the head of FSD at Tesla, clarified that this would be miles between critical disengagement.

That means that based on the crowdsourced data, Tesla FSD v13 will achieve between 690 and 828 miles between critical disengagement.

If Tesla indeed delivers v13 by the end of the month, we should know whether that’s true or not within the next few weeks.

• Elon Musk finally admits Tesla’s HW3 might not support full self-driving
• Tesla to offer free upgrades to FSD owners on HW3, but not yet

As long as they make good on their promise to (somehow) retrofit the capable hardware, and continue supporting FSD transfers, I don't see much problem with this. If not, it seems like they're setting themselves up for a class-action lawsuit.