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. Today, alongside cars, it has robots and flying cars in its commercial product portfolio.
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; brushed metal speaker covers; 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.
The other potential autonomy wrinkle—depending on your point of view—is that XPeng is in the “no lidar” camp (just like Tesla with Full Self-Driving, or FSD) for autonomous vehicle tech. Liu insists that the boosted compute power and increasingly refined models, combined with the built-in camera system on the L03, are more than a match for any competitor rocking a lidar-powered alternative. Looking at videos like this will give some pause for thought, however.
Right now, when I ask auto manufacturers which system is better, lidar or cameras, it seems to entirely depend on which system the maker has backed. Most of XPeng's Chinese rivals (BYD, Zeekr, Nio) have opted for lidar.
In person, what's striking about the L03 to the casual eye—apart from the surprisingly pleasant interior that indeed does feel “beyond class,” complete with anchor points for action cameras and magnetic clips for accessories such as camping lights—is how similar it is in looks to the Ferrari Luce. It's not miles away from Denza's Z9 GT, either.
All three EVs occupy radically different prices: budget, premium, and luxury. It's interesting, then, that there seems to be some convergence here in styling, one that helps XPeng appear more premium than it might be, and arguably impacts higher-end marques as they struggle to really differentiate their offerings when luxury EVs are not selling.
Perhaps it's not surprising that some might see a similarity between the Luce and the L03. XPeng's head of design is none other than JuanMa López, the former Ferrari head of exterior design from 2010 to 2018, during which he helped determine the outlines of some 25 models, including the LaFerrari, SF90 Stradale, and the Monza SP. López was not involved in the Luce itself; that design task was uncharacteristically outsourced to LoveFrom, the agency founded by Jony Ive in 2019 upon his exit from Apple.
I put this convergence of design styles to Rafik Ferrag, head of creative design at XPeng, and asked why exterior aesthetics no longer seem to denote a car's segment. Twenty years ago, you could look at a car and know what price bracket it was in. Not now.
“Yes, that's right. In the past, it was impossible for an entry-level car to afford the technology or even the decorative elements that a luxury car has. Today, that's no longer true,” Ferrag says. “Our goal as designers is to reach the top level. If we can look as good as a Ferrari or a Bentley in an entry-level car, we'll do it. And that's what we are trying to do here, to reach this preciseness, this material fit and finish, color precision, and technology.”
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