Chinese Tesla rival XPeng begins testing “flying car” at high altitude

XPeng Motors, one of a number of Chinese electric vehicle companies vying for market share and headline space, reportedly exhibited its Voyager X2 flying car at the Chengdu Auto Show on August 29 and announced that it was being tested in extreme environments and at high altitudes.

XPeng is better known for its ground-based electric vehicles, including the P7 which, when it was first unveiled back in early 2020, was lauded as offering all-electric range of up to 706-kilometres under the NEDC cycle – significantly more than Tesla’s entry-level Model 3 with its claimed 460-kilometre driving range.

Though only offered in China, its price started at RMB229,900 ($A50,150 converted) with its top of the range variant priced up to RMB349,000 ($A76,430 converted).

At the start of 2021, XPeng also unveiled a beta version of its highway autonomous driving solution, Navigation Guided Pilot (NGP), in a series of media road tests in the Hong Kong port city of Guangzhou.

But XPeng has also been developing a flying car – which, of course, is more a quadcopter than anything the Jetson’s or Rick Deckard may have been familiar with – and according to Chinese automotive news site CnEVPost, the company exhibited the flying car at the Chengdu Auto Show on August 29.

XPeng also revealed that their flying car, the Voyager X2, is currently being tested in extreme environments at high altitude and has undergone several internal flight tests at flight bases in Guangzhou, Dongguan, and Jiangmen in early June of this year.

The XPeng X2 is the fifth generation of the company’s flying car design and its first two-person model. The X2 is also the first time a closed cockpit has been used and has taken its design cues from the company’s P7 sedan.

The X2’s fuselage is made from carbon fibre and weighs only 385-kilograms including a battery, which provides a range of up to 35 minutes of flight time for two passengers with a maximum load of 200-kilograms and at altitudes of under 1,000-metres. Boasting a maximum flight speed of 130km/h, the X2 offers both manual and autopilot flight modes.