# 

*Chinese EV maker delivers the autonomous parking feature Tesla promised five years ago and still hasn't properly nailed.*

XPeng shifted 186,000 vehicles in 2024, and the standout feature wasn't range or acceleration or any of the usual EV bragging points. It was parking. Specifically, the ability to get out of your car in front of a space that would make a London taxi driver wince, tap your phone, and watch the thing slot itself in without you.

This is XNGP, XPeng's Navigation Guided Pilot system, running on dual Nvidia Orin-X chips that pump out 508 TOPS of processing power. The hardware setup includes LiDAR, cameras, ultrasonic sensors... the full spatial awareness toolkit. What matters is that it works. Parallel, perpendicular, angled. It handles the lot via a smartphone app. You summon it back the same way.

Tesla announced Smart Summon in 2019. Six years later it still crawls around car parks like a nervous learner and requires you to stand there watching it the whole time. BMW had Remote Control Parking back in 2015 for the 7 Series, but you needed to be stood right next to the car holding the key fob. Mercedes launched Remote Park Assist in 2020 with the same proximity requirement. None of them let you genuinely walk away and leave the car to it.

XPeng does. So do BYD and NIO, both of which rolled out similar features across their Chinese market lineups in 2023 and 2024. Hyundai and Genesis offer Remote Smart Parking Assist but insist on line of sight. Chinese manufacturers are shipping features that Western brands are still beta testing or hedging with liability disclaimers. They are not talking about full self-driving five years from now. They are shipping functional AI applications today that solve specific problems people actually have.

Like this? Get the Buzz: [GAUK Motorbuzz](https://gaukmotorbuzz.com/) All your favourite motoring channels, publishers, motorsports, news & reviews. Curated Automotive Awesomeness

Dense urban environments where parking is a legitimate daily aggravation, not a party trick, reveal the real value of this feature. Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen... cities where multi-storey car parks have spaces designed for vehicles that no longer exist and where an extra 200mm of width means the difference between parking and not parking. Western automakers are still optimising for Tesco car parks and wide American lots. XPeng is solving for reality.

The XPILOT 4.0 system that enables this runs across the G9, P7i, and G6 models. It is not a premium option. It is standard kit. The computing power required to make it reliable is already baked into the platform because these cars were designed around software from the start, not bolted onto an existing ICE architecture with autonomous features added later as an upsell.

Whether this transfers to Western markets depends on tariffs, regulation, and the usual protectionist theatre. But the technology gap is real and it is widening. You can dismiss Chinese EVs as cheap knockoffs subsidised by the state, but when a G9 owner in Guangzhou can summon their car from three floors down in a packed garage and a Model Y owner in Milton Keynes is still stood there with their thumb on the app hoping it does not clip a wing mirror, the argument starts to look thin.

XPeng is not the first to attempt this. They are just the first to make it work reliably enough that people use it without thinking about it. That is the actual test of autonomous technology. Not what it can do in a controlled demo. What it does when you are late, it is raining, and you cannot be bothered to squeeze past someone's poorly parked Q5.

Sources: [Jalopnik](https://jalopnik.com/), XPeng Motors

XPeng sold 186,000 cars last year and every one of them can park itself while you walk away