XPENG YOYO Wins Guangzhou L4 Robotaxi Approval

XPENG has been cleared to run its YOYO robotaxi service across the whole of Guangzhou, the Chinese carmaker’s home city. On 26 October the company said on its official Weibo account that it had obtained Guangzhou’s qualification for intelligent connected vehicle demonstration operations, allowing it to run Level 4 robotaxi demonstration operations “across all of Guangzhou”, according to CLS, which cited the post.

The service is not opening to everyone. Candice Yuan, who heads XPENG’s robotaxi business, said on Weibo that access would keep widening through invitation codes in the early phase, expanding coverage “while ensuring safety”, CnEVPost reported.

In brief

XPENG says YOYO may now run L4 robotaxi demonstration operations anywhere in Guangzhou.
Riders still need an invitation code, and coverage will widen in stages.
Passenger rides with no safety driver are planned for 2027; they have not started.

What XPENG says the approval allows

XPENG describes the step as a move from technology validation to testing operations and a business model. In the company’s words, as carried by Sina Tech, demonstration operation means the product “begins to enter a real mobility service system”. Driving reliably is one part. Order response, dispatch, pick-up and drop-off, service flow and handling of abnormal situations also decide whether a service can keep running. The company says the team will gather data on vehicle utilisation, dispatch efficiency, service cost and fleet management.

Yuan said the approval moves the business from internal testing towards public service, and that daily operation would help XPENG build “mature, replicable” robotaxi solutions for partners worldwide, according to CnEVPost.

XPENG has not said how many cars are in the fleet, how many invitations it has issued, what hours the service runs or what invited riders pay.

How YOYO got here

The company’s own timeline, set out on its website on 19 October, runs from a production robotaxi rolling off the line in May, through the full ride-hailing chain working and staff testing in July, to a Guangzhou remote-testing qualification in August. That August permit allowed tests with no safety operator in the driver’s seat on designated test roads. CnEVPost adds a road-testing permit in January and a dedicated robotaxi division in March. On 8 October the service took the YOYO name and opened invitation-only registration, which TSN covered when XPENG opened YOYO to invited public users. XPENG says more than 2,000 internal test rides had been completed, Gasgoo reported.

XPENG calls YOYO China’s first full-stack, in-house, factory-built robotaxi. It is based on the GX SUV and carries four of XPENG’s Turing AI chips, which the company rates at 3,000 TOPS of effective computing power. It runs the company’s second-generation VLA model and, XPENG says, uses neither lidar nor high-definition maps.

The plans: driver-free rides and European partners

XPENG’s next targets are plans, not results. Chief executive He Xiaopeng said on the August earnings call that the company aimed to carry passengers with no safety driver in 2027, CnEVPost reported, and XPENG repeated the “next year” target on 26 October, according to Gasgoo. He also said XPENG would work with domestic and international ride-hailing platforms from 2027. At the Paris motor show he said YOYO was in detailed talks with several leading European mobility platforms, Sina Tech reported. No partner has been named.

Citywide scope changes the test, not the business

Before this approval, XPENG’s permits covered testing on designated roads. A citywide qualification removes that map limit from the regulator’s side, so the company’s own choices now set the pace: how many invitations go out and how fast coverage grows. That makes the missing numbers more telling. Baidu has given residents of Tung Chung free Apollo Go rides in a defined trial. XPENG has a whole city to work with and has not said how much of it it will use. The approval allows operations at city scale, but it does not show that XPENG can run them.

2027 is the date that carries the weight

Several rivals have also pinned their plans to 2027. Freenow and Baidu have aimed at a London launch that year, and Tesla is targeting unsupervised driving in owners’ cars in the second quarter of 2027. XPENG’s version is the more demanding test: carrying fare-paying public riders with nobody at the wheel, in its own home city. XPENG’s vision-only system has no published independent safety data, and a demonstration period is likely to produce the first operating figures outsiders can judge. Until XPENG publishes them, 2027 is a target.

The first figure worth asking for is the simplest: how many YOYO cars are on Guangzhou’s roads today.