Chinese smart electric vehicle maker XPeng has completed a 1,900 mile autonomous driving expedition, China’s longest real highway autonomous driving challenge by mass-produced vehicles.

The fleet, comprising XPeng P7s, drove more than 2,250 miles from Guangzhou to Beijing with 1,820 miles of highway driving under the control of the Navigation Guided Pilot (NGP), achieved an average of 1.14 human driver interventions per 100 miles. The company claims this sets a new benchmark for long-distance autonomous driving by mass production passenger vehicles.

Under the control of the NGP, the average success rate for lane changing and overtaking was 94.41% during the 8-day expedition, started from Guangzhou on 19 March and ending in Beijing on 26 March. The average highway ramp entering and exiting success rate was 92.76% and average tunnel pass-through success rate was 94.95% during the same period.

228 auto journalists, EV enthusiasts and industry experts participated in the expedition, driving a fleet of 12 to 15 P7s, visiting ten cities in six provinces along China’s eastern coastal corridor. The route was chosen to cover some of the most complex yet representative road conditions and driving scenarios in China, to fully test the NGP’s responses and effectiveness.

The company says that the NGP delivered stable performance in rainstorm conditions, passing through tunnels, and on highways in mountain areas during the 8-day expedition.

NGP provides navigation assisted autonomous driving and is available on highways covered by high-precision maps in China. Its full-scenario high-definition positioning capability is designed to solve HD-map positioning challenges for China’s complex road conditions, including areas with no GPS signals.

The NGP is enabled by the P7’s XPILOT 3.0 autonomous driving architecture, with 14 cameras, 5 millimetre-wave radars, 12 ultrasonic sensors, centimetre-level high-definition positioning, decimetre-level high-definition mapping, NVIDIA Xavier system-on-the-chip computing platform, and Bosch iBooster brake system.

Currently, the XPeng P7 is China’s only mass production car with a 360-degree dual camera and radar fusion perception system for added safety.

“The expedition has fully challenged the robustness and reliability of the NGP function. The results demonstrate that it is not only the strongest, but also the easiest to use autonomous driving function for production vehicles available in the market,” said Mr. He Xiaopeng, Chairman and CEO of XPeng, at a press briefing in Beijing.

“We strive to become the world’s top autonomous driving hardware and software provider, and our strategy and R&D capabilities place us well in achieving this goal,” Mr. He added.