On October 26, XPeng Group said it had won Guangzhou's intelligent connected vehicle demonstration operation permit, clearing its Robotaxi brand "XPeng Youyou" to run L4-level demonstration operations across the entire city. The company said the approval moves its Robotaxi effort from technology validation into validating operations and business models.

The opening still comes with conditions. XPeng Youyou will keep scaling gradually through invitation codes at first, and as of October it had completed more than 2,000 internal test orders in Guangzhou. Fleet size, rollout pace and pricing were not disclosed.

The company got here one step at a time. Its first factory-built, mass-production Robotaxi rolled off the line in Guangzhou in May. In July it completed the full chain from online ordering to automated pickup and drop-off and opened internal testing to employees. In August it secured remote testing credentials, allowing tests with no safety driver behind the wheel on Guangzhou's tier-1, tier-2 and tier-3 test roads. On October 8 the brand was named XPeng Youyou and its ride-hailing mini program went live. The citywide permit on October 26 is the first approval along that path that allows carrying passengers.

"Citywide" Solves Geography, Not Operating Experience

Until now XPeng held road testing permits and remote testing credentials: the cars could drive and the driver's seat could sit empty, but it was all still testing. Demonstration operation is different. It allows passengers, and the scope covers the whole city rather than one district or a few fixed routes.

Guangzhou is hardly an empty market. Pony.ai took the city's first remote passenger-carrying permit back in April 2023; by the end of June this year its fleet stood at 1,975 vehicles, with a target of more than 3,500 by year-end, serving the four districts of Haizhu, Tianhe, Huangpu and Panyu. WeRide is also headquartered in Guangzhou, and as of July 31 its global L4 fleet numbered roughly 3,400 vehicles, more than 1,800 of them Robotaxis, with 24-hour driverless commercial service in Huangpu, Tianhe and Haizhu. Both have been running for years. XPeng is the latecomer.

Rivals Are Counting Per-Vehicle Revenue; XPeng Is Fielding a Flagship Six-Seater

The difference starts with the car itself. XPeng's Robotaxi is built on the flagship GX, a full-size six-seat SUV measuring 5,265 millimeters long and priced from 279,800 to 359,800 yuan. It carries four in-house Turing AI chips with 3,000 TOPS of effective computing power and runs a second-generation VLA model, with no lidar and no dependence on high-definition maps.

Pony.ai's seventh generation goes the other way. The vehicles are based on GAC Aion's second-generation AION V and BAIC ARCFOX Alpha T5, in the 100,000 to 150,000 yuan class, fitted with nine lidars and 14 cameras, with sensor and compute costs held under 150,000 yuan. According to Southern Metropolis Daily, its autonomous driving kit costs 70% less than the previous generation, with lidar down 68%.

XPeng is betting on a different set of numbers. Lidar keeps getting cheaper; the genuinely expensive part is high-definition mapping, which means sending survey fleets to scan the streets of every new city and keep updating them, since any road change makes the map obsolete. Cut the map, rely on model generalization to adapt to new cities, and the cost of replication comes down. The trade-off is that today's vehicle is too expensive: a large six-seater starting near 280,000 yuan, deployed into a fleet business where a single car grosses a few hundred yuan a day. According to Southern Metropolis Daily, He Xiaopeng's plans for this year include launching an economy Robotaxi model in 2027.

Rivals already have per-vehicle figures on the board. Pony.ai's seventh generation turned city-level per-vehicle operations profitable in Guangzhou in November 2025 and in Shenzhen in February 2026, at roughly 23 orders per vehicle per day. According to Southern Metropolis Daily, daily revenue per vehicle was 299 yuan in Guangzhou at the crossover point, and net income per vehicle in Shenzhen was 338 yuan a day. But Pony.ai did not disclose the profit amount at the crossover, the figure is measured per vehicle, and it came in the core districts with the highest order density, which is not the same thing as company-wide profitability.

No Fleet of Its Own, and No One in China Has Made the Commission Model Work

XPeng's choice is counterintuitive: it won't take the orders. He Xiaopeng has said on an earnings call that the company will build the product and take a commission rather than run operations itself, with revenue coming from hardware sales, technology services and commission splits, and offline operations handed to partners. Amap is the first global ecosystem partner. Overseas, the company says it is in advanced talks with several European mobility platforms.

By contrast, Apollo Go, WeRide and Pony.ai all run fleets themselves or build them alongside partners. Whether a technology supplier can capture enough operating data to close the loop, and hold its gross margin when partners push on price, has no proven example in China yet.