Gasgoo Munich- On May 8, XPENG announced that its second-generation VLA smart driving system has been live for a month, with smart driving mileage accounting for more than 50% of real-world driving scenarios. This is a global first for the intelligent driving industry, marking a shift where advanced driver assistance moves from an optional feature to a daily, high-frequency necessity.
Data indicates a broadly positive performance during the first month of the second-generation VLA rollout: driver interventions per 100 kilometers dropped 25.87% month-on-month, while trips relying entirely on smart driving climbed 27.84%.
Image Source: XPENG
During the recent May Day holiday, the daily adoption rate of AI driver assistance on XPENG models equipped with the system hit 93.21%, accumulating 84.46 million kilometers of smart driving. The longest single smart-driving trip reached 5,441 kilometers. Meanwhile, new vehicle owners activated the VLA system at a rate of 97.43% in the first week, with a monthly active rate of 96.97%. Total usage mileage and duration surged 91.05% and 107.86%, respectively.
As XPENG's proprietary mass-production physical-world model, the second-generation VLA achieves a breakthrough by restructuring the smart driving architecture. It eliminates intermediate translation steps in the traditional "vision-language-action" pipeline, enabling end-to-end generation of driving actions directly from visual signals. Decision latency is compressed to under 80 milliseconds.
Trained on massive amounts of real-world data, the system boasts full-scene generalization capabilities and operates independently of high-definition maps. It handles complex road conditions including highways, urban streets, and aging residential complexes.
Surpassing the 50% usage threshold marks a critical inflection point for the adoption of smart driving. Where the industry once fixated on technical tiers and feature demonstrations, metrics like actual usage and intervention rates now better reflect utility and user acceptance. The performance of XPENG's second-generation VLA confirms that China's smart driving technology is ready for large-scale deployment, pushing industry evaluation standards from technical parameters to real-world value.
